


how to love

by legendaryguitarman



Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-10-29 03:54:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10845948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/legendaryguitarman/pseuds/legendaryguitarman
Summary: chanyeol thinks it's a good idea to sign jongdae up to a dating company, jongdae doesn't think it's a good idea that chanyeol's signing him up to a dating company, and in the midst of it all, jongin runs an illicit doggie day-care centre.





	1. Chapter 1

The way that Jongdae saw it was that there were three types of boyfriends in the world.  
  
The Boyfriends were complicated creatures: there were the We’re Not Boyfriends (No Homo) Boyfriends; the Good Boyfriends, and the Bad Boyfriends. Jongdae’d had his fair share of the latter, which meant that during one night of bad decisions and a four-pack of beer, he dawned upon the horrific truth of reality—boys were stupid and gross and smelt kind of weird, no matter how good they looked in suits. And even after the traumatic, mentally-scarring years of his childhood where he could only watch as the other children were allowed to eat full-fat dairy chocolate ice cream and he had to eat the soy version because __you’re special, Jongdae, and look how jealous they are of you!__ he was actually glad that he was lactose intolerant because he didn’t want his milkshake bringin’ no boys to his yard. Thus, on that fateful night after his second bottle of inevitable liver failure, he began his journey to become a strong, independent (wo)man who didn’t need no man.  
  
And this is where he had ended up, in the realm of the group with no boyfriends, the Singles. The Singles were the in-between kind of people, the kind of people who awkwardly watched movies alone in the cinema with popcorn, __extra large, please, and oh, is your ice cream soy? No? Okay, just the popcorn then, please.__ They could be extremely unpredictable due to their diverse nature of being anything from the weird kid who sat in the back of the classroom to the absolute scum of the Earth, a Brony, but that didn’t mean that being single was bad. In fact, it was the complete opposite. Being single was great, Jongdae realised. Being single was the relationship version of, like, heroin. He could stay at home every Saturday night and eat ten boxes of pizza, hold the cheese, and catch up on _Game of Thrones_ so Jongin would stop blackmailing him with spoiler alerts. The pure ecstasy he got with no one to judge him when he shovelled another slice of pepperoni pizza into his mouth, seasoned with the salt of his own tears because _oh my god, DROGO JUST DIED?????,_ was the best feeling in the entire world, he decided.  
  
However, his friends didn’t seem to share the same sentiments as him, which was unfortunate, but not so unfortunate that he was about to give up his newfound freedom to crawl into someone else’s pants. Despite the two-and-a-half pounds he’d gained from having Pizza Hut on speed-dial, he was not a ‘fat pile of shit, get the fuck off me,’ thank you very much, Chanyeol. He was just…full of swag. Yeah, that was it. The pepperoni pizza had bestowed him with the powers of swag and he had to shoulder two-and-a-half-pounds of metaphorical burden alone. Duty called and there just wasn’t enough space in his life, alongside his packed schedule of watching scenes containing Nudity and Explicit Violence and blessing the general surrounding area with his funkiness, to accommodate another person.  
  
Of course, when he said ‘friends,’ what he actually meant was ‘friend.’ It was sort of weird how Chanyeol had a huge problem with him being single, like it mentally and physically repulsed him to the point where he was insisting that Jongdae had to _get a boyfriend already!_ which Jongdae just didn’t get. He was fresh out of university; he had decent jobs—lead vocalist in Chanyeol’s band, EL D★RADO, with the stylised symbols and all, and he moonlighted as a waiter in a sushi restaurant at weekends—and he still had his golden years ahead of him so he was in no rush to get back into the whole dating thing. Besides, the last guy he’d dated had kind of been a huge jerk and they’d broken up on bad terms when Jongdae had found him trying to eat the neck of another guy. Even though Jongdae had known from the start, somewhere deep inside him, that they weren’t meant to be together because he hadn’t been Jongdae’s Nemo, hadn’t been the One who would make his heart beat faster and his gut flutter and jump, he’d just been so sick of being lonely and seeing everyone so happy because Chanyeol had Jongin and Sehun had Kyungsoo and everyone had someone except for him. He’d convinced himself for a little while that he had found the One, but that had been short-lived. Jongdae remembered very, very clearly how it had taken two seconds for Joonmyun to steal his heart, two seconds to break it, and a twelve month Netflix subscription to fix it.  
  
And then, he had realised that maybe being alone wouldn’t be too bad. Maybe he was alone, but that didn’t mean he was lonely because he had his friends around to support him and shove their happiness in his face. He didn’t have to care about what other people thought of him, didn’t have to watch his weight even though it went straight to his hips, and he could live with ten cats and it would be socially acceptable. He didn’t need a boyfriend because now, he had porn. Porn wouldn’t judge him. Porn wouldn’t cheat on him with twinky boys. Porn showed him nice videos of boys getting their cocks sucked and told him that hot single MILFs in his area wanted to ride his big cock, and although he wasn’t into women, he appreciated the thought.  
  
Breaking up with Joonmyun had been one of those hippie-nature-excursion, life-changing experiences. It had really opened his eyes to the true horrors of dating and the ridiculous concept of ‘love.’ ‘Love’ was overrated and he had given up on his ideals of finding his Nemo. Joonmyun had made him who he was today—Pathetic and Desperate, according to Chanyeol, who would always yell it through the door when he would be having one of his Deep and Philosophical Monologues during his daily morning shit. Being single was amazing, but Chanyeol was irritatingly persistent in getting to date again with all his annoying, late night Man-to-Man talks and his PowerPoint presentations on _The Perks of Dating: 101 Reasons Why You Should Find a Boyfriend, a PowerPoint Presentation by Park Chanyeol_ , so eventually, when Chanyeol reached Reason [#48](http://www.livejournal.com/rsearch/?tags=%2348), Jongdae couldn’t take it anymore. The sleep deprivation, the ugly PowerPoint themes and slide transitions—it all became too much to handle. He admitted defeat and finally agreed to get back into the dating game.  
  
Chanyeol celebrated by throwing an impromptu three-person party and getting piss-drunk with Jongin, and Jongdae didn’t quite have the heart to tell him that the only reason why he was doing this in the first place was that in his personal experience, ‘boyfriend’ was synonymous to ‘free lunch.’ What he expected was for Chanyeol to set him up with one of his friends so he could go on a few dates for the food and never speak to them again, therefore preserving the sanctity of his Facebook relationship status whilst getting a free Nando’s lunch special. What actually happened was that Chanyeol signed him up to ‘100VE,’ a dating company where Chanyeol’s Totes BFFL XOXOXO Luv U Babe Yes Homo friend, Baekhyun, was a so-called love guru. These things were always scams though, always elaborate schemes to deceive gullible, unsuspecting Singles into paying money for absolute bullshit. Jongdae didn’t need this. He could listen to Chanyeol talk for free.  
  
And Baekhyun. There was something about that name that was unsettlingly familiar. He’d been friends with a Baekhyun during high school—they’d had a Three Musketeers sort of thing, him, Chanyeol and Baekhyun—and he’d also had one of those awkward friend-crushes on that very same Baekhyun. He had never done anything about it though because he’d been sure that he wasn’t Baekhyun’s type. Jongdae had been into boys who were small. Boys who were cute. Boys who were Baekhyun. Conversely, Baekhyun had been into boys who had big boobs and small waists and long legs and vaginas. Boys who were pretty much not boys and were actually girls—he’d been, like, the token straight guy in their little group—and boys who were definitely not Jongdae. But Jongdae had gotten over it. That had been the past. It had been a while since he had last seen Baekhyun, a while since he’d thought about Baekhyun, and Chanyeol’s Baekhyun probably wasn’t the same Baekhyun that they’d used to hang out with anyway. There were probably thousands of Baekhyuns in the world. It wasn’t unlikely that Chanyeol would’ve found another one to have a homoerotic BFF relationship with. What were the chances that he would meet his high school crush again and inevitably fall in love with him? His life wasn’t a shitty fanfiction, goddammit!  
  
Having said that, it didn’t really make much sense when he found himself in Baekhyun’s office on a Wednesday afternoon, dressed in a nice button-up shirt with no discernible pizza stains and thinking, _huh, small world,_ because Chanyeol’s Baekhyun just so happened to be his high school crush and that wasn’t coincidental at all! At that very moment, Jongdae realised, with startling clarity, that he was nothing but a puppet, forced to live a life of story clichés and badly scripted dialogue, and was currently in the chapter where he questioned all of his life choices, but mostly Baekhyun’s sense of interior design.  
  
Jongdae had never seen anything like it. He didn’t quite know how to describe it; the room had been painted bright neon pink and there were several posters of kittens in teacups and ponies riding rainbows pasted on the walls. The main highlight, though, was the huge movie poster of Nicolas Cage in _National Treasure_ hanging behind Baekhyun’s head. Jongdae wasn’t usually one to judge by appearances, but this was just something else entirely.  
  
Baekhyun seemed unperturbed by it. He was probably used to it by now; the only other reasonable explanation was that all the pink had burned his retinas to the depths of hell so he couldn’t even see that Nic Cage was creeping on him. To be honest, Jongdae wasn’t surprised. Baekhyun had probably seen plenty of weird shit in his life, like boobs and vaginas. And speaking of vaginas, another thing: Baekhyun had gotten a helluva lot more metrosexual since high school if his pink walls were anything to go by, which sparked a brief flicker of hope in Jongdae before he remembered that he wasn’t into Baekhyun anymore. He wasn’t into relationships anymore. _You’re doing this for the food, bruh,_ he mentally reprimanded himself. _For. The. Food. Don’t lose track of who you truly are.[#SinglePride2014](http://www.livejournal.com/rsearch/?tags=%23SinglePride2014)._ He reminded himself that he wasn’t here to hang around, especially with Nic Cage molesting him with those dark, soulless, boy-hungry eyes, and the atmosphere was becoming awkward because it had been so long since they’d seen each other that neither of them knew what to say. _Uh, hey, how’s being straight going? You know, I have a friend who’s straight! You two should totally get together some time and talk about straight people things, like legal marriage!_  
  
“So,” he said, because all he really wanted was to get this over with, “you’ve changed, Baekhyun.”  
  
“Yeah, it’s called puberty. A concept that is probably still foreign to you,” said Baekhyun, and no, Jongdae thought, Baekhyun hadn’t really changed. He was still delightful, as always, and by that, Jongdae meant he was still a rude little shit. “I like to think that I’ve matured.”  
  
“Riiiiight,” said Jongdae. “That’s why you have kittens in teacups on your walls, a pink office, and a huge creepy-ass Nic Cage like some sort of cult-shrine. _National Treasure_ isn’t even a good film.”  
  
“It’s magenta, you ignorant lummox,” Baekhyun replied with a disdainful sniff. “And that’s Nicolas Cage-sunbaenim to you because FYI, _National Treasure_ is a masterpiece, but a plebeian like you wouldn’t understand. Nicolas Cage-sunbaenim is my queen. Do not blaspheme in my presence.”  
  
Jongdae shuddered; he couldn’t believe that there was once a time in his life when he found Baekhyun’s obnoxious, Nic Cage-loving self actually _endearing._ “Uh, anyway,” he said, trying to purge those memories from his mind, “how does this thing work? Do I just go out with random people and hope that they’re the one for me? And more importantly, do I get a friend-discount?”  
  
“Good question,” said Baekhyun. “It’s not as easy as it sounds. There’s some real science at work here, you know. First things first—tell me about yourself. I’ll input your information into the database and algorithm magic will happen, and bada-bing, bada-boom! It’ll pair you up with the person who has the highest compatibility rating with you. That is, to say, the person who matches your interests the best. For instance, if you enjoy playing with balls, the computer will match you up with a person who also enjoys playing with balls. Like a basketball player, for example. You’ll be having your gross vanilla sex in no time!” He stopped to catch his breath. “And discount, ten percent. Send my regards to Chanyeol.”  
  
“Impressive,” said Jongdae. _How you’ve managed to develop such elaborate bullshit from the baseless concept of ‘love.’_  
  
But! He supposed that there was no harm in giving this a try. He wasn’t even paying for this—Chanyeol was. Doing this dumb dating thing stood against everything he believed in (1. Pizza was sexy; 2. Porn was God’s gift to humanity, and 3. Boyfriends were for losers, which was why Chanyeol had one) so it was a good thing that he had always been a very morally loose kind of guy.  
  
“Fine, whatever,” he said, and Baekhyun beamed at him, all teeth and sunshine. Not that Jongdae noticed if Baekhyun smiled at him or not because he didn’t even like Baekhyun anymore, not one bit. “So, do I just…?”  
  
“Tell me about yourself,” said Baekhyun, nodding. He took out a notebook from the top drawer of his desk and clicked his pen. “Be thorough. Be detailed. I want to know everything.”  
  
Jongdae’d had a lot of practice at talking, but not a lot of practice at talking about himself. He didn’t really know how to describe himself without sounding like an egotistical, self-absorbed asshat because that was more of Baekhyun’s forte, and his hobbies were rather questionable. He wasn’t a particularly interesting person, not unless eating his way to adulthood obesity and jacking off to amateur porn was somehow appealing to needy, desperate basketballers.  
  
“Uh, well,” he started, hesitating a bit, “I guess I’m interested in music, but you probably already knew that. Majored in music in university and now I’m in Chanyeol’s band, lead singer. But you probably already knew that too.” He wasn’t going to lie; there was a part of him that was smugly triumphant about him being in a cool, teen heartthrob band when Baekhyun was stuck in his shitty-ass _pink_ office with his shitty-ass conman job. “And I have a part-time job as a waiter because you know, in this economy, you can’t afford to be picky. I have an interest in films”—he left out the fact that they usually involve boys with their faces buried in butts—“and cooking”—especially the sophisticated Italian cuisine of Pizza Hut—“and classical mythology”—which might or might not be limited to his extensive knowledge of the One Ring, forged in the fires of Mount Doom.  
  
Baekhyun simply made a noise of affirmation, jotting something down onto his notepad. “Alright, that should be enough. There are some questions I’d like you to answer too,” he said. He flipped to a fresh page in his notebook and grabbed another sheet of paper from his drawer. Jongdae leaned forward to take a look but Baekhyun yanked it out of the way before he could, covering it with his arm and giving Jongdae a pointed look. “Firstly,” he said, “how do you like to spend your weekends? A) Going out with friends; B) Staying at home with a good book; C) Hiking up mountains, or D) Summoning Satan?”  
  
It was an unconventional question but by now, nothing was even that weird anymore. The pink office, Nic Cage undressing him with his eyes, and friggin’ _Baekhyun,_ his actual high school crush, being some sort of relationship counsellor. He half-expected Baekhyun to sprout a pair of Givenchy devil horns and helicopter-dick his way into Metrosexual Hell next. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort happened and Baekhyun was just sitting there, looking at him strangely as he waited for an answer.  
  
“Probably staying at home with a good book?” he answered meekly under Baekhyun’s judging stare.  
  
“NERD,” Baekhyun coughed loudly. Jongdae glared at him and he hastily cleared his throat. “Sorry, I have a cold. It’s phlegm season. Let’s move on. Second question: how would you describe your style? A) Funky; B) Casual; C) Sporty, or D) Satanic?”  
  
“Definitely A,” Jongdae replied.  
  
Baekhyun hummed, scribbling in his notebook. The questions went on for a while and without realising it, they fell into easy conversation, talking about trivial things like last night’s episode of _Twelve Twinks, One Korean Barbecue_ and that one time when Chanyeol had thought it’d be a good idea to go for that Mad Swaggie Scientist look. Jongdae was surprised how quickly he felt comfortable with Baekhyun, even with the years they’d been apart, and it was like they were back in high school again, minus the raging boner and the constant futile wishes that Baekhyun would like him instead of the big-boobed girl in the year above. Baekhyun just had this inexplicable charm that drew people to him and that had been part of the reason why Jongdae had liked him so much. He was just naturally charismatic without having to try; he was outgoing and sociable and the type of person who you couldn’t help but want to be friends with. Despite having qualms about Chanyeol’s suggestion, it was nice to see Baekhyun again at least.  
  
They caught up on the past few years, the years that Jongdae had spent studying his ass off and trying to make it big in the music industry whilst Baekhyun had devoted himself to preaching the word of _Eat, Pray, Love_ to the general public, and Jongdae was glad to see that Baekhyun was still the same old Baekhyun. He was still loud and obnoxious and kind of cute and Jongdae told himself that when Baekhyun smiled at him, the flutter in his stomach meant nothing. It was the lingering remains of an old crush and it was a nice feeling, something warm in his chest. Nothing more than that.  
  
And when he saw the gold-plated ring on Baekhyun’s finger, left hand, he told himself that the sudden clench of his fist wasn’t jealousy.  
  
“You’re married?” he asked, careful to keep his tone neutral.  
  
Baekhyun looked up from his notes and twisted the ring around absentmindedly. His hands were small and his fingers were long and thin, and Jongdae thought about how they would look laced between his. In high school. He’d thought about how they would look between his in _high school._ He wasn’t into Baekhyun anymore. Baekhyun was straight. He was not. Trying to put them together would be like a gorilla trying to push a cylinder through the square hole in one of those animal experiments. No matter how hard he could try to force it to happen, it never would.  
  
“What,” said Baekhyun, “are you jealous or something?” He let out a laugh as Jongdae spluttered indignantly. “I’m not. Married, that is. In my line of work, it’s not unusual for clients to fall in love with me. Without this, I’d be, like, covered in girls and illegitimate babies.”  
  
“Would probably suit you more than all this pink though.”  
  
He grinned when Baekhyun glared at him and hissed under his breath, “It’s magenta. This is the exact reason why our generation is shit.”  
  
When the barrage of questions ended, Baekhyun scribbled down more notes and produced a sheet of paper with a flourish. “Ta-dah! Results are in! _If you mostly answered B,_ ” he said, “ _you are most like the Disney Princess Belle! You enjoy the simple things in life, like reading and magically enchanted candelabras! However, keep in mind two things: Do not be fooled by appearances and do not worry too much about finding your prince! He might be closer than you think._ ”  
  
“…..”  
  
“What?” asked Baekhyun defensively. “ _Teen Vogue_ never lies.”  
  
“Suuuuure,” Jongdae said. He resisted the urge to roll his eyes but he couldn’t keep the sarcastic tone out of his voice, which Baekhyun picked up on with a scowl. “What now then? Are you gonna hook me up with some weird man-beast mutant who’s been cursed by an evil witch? Just so you know, I’m not into that kind of freaky stuff.”  
  
“What kind of freaky stuff are you into then?”  
  
“Handcuffs and vibrators and big, massive, six-inch—uh, nothing. I am not into any freaky shit at all,” said Jongdae quickly, his cheeks turning red as Baekhyun snorted in laughter. “Nothing at all. Please don’t set me up with a weird dominatrix. I’m not into that kind of stuff.”  
  
In reality, his ideal man was someone who would let Jongdae eat pizza off his body, and he’d be so tall and buff and hot that the pepperoni would burn as soon as it’d touch him, but Jongdae didn’t think Baekhyun needed to know that. Baekhyun didn’t need any more strange ideas.  
  
“Who would’ve thought that widdle geeky Kim Jongdae would be into kinky sex?” Baekhyun said, stifling a giggle with the back of his hand. That was Extremely Annoying and Not At All Cute, Jongdae thought. Not at all. “God, the last time I saw you in high school, you wouldn’t even touch another girl. Or anyone at all for that matter. You’d act like you were allergic to them and you’d mutter something about ‘cooties’ underneath your breath. Ah, high school days. Good times.”  
  
 _That was because I wanted your cooties instead,_ Jongdae thought bitterly. But that had been the past. He no longer wanted Baekhyun’s cooties, just like how he no longer thought Baekhyun was cute. Not. Cute. At. All.  
  
“Yeah, uh, about the girl thing. Maybe it had something about how I was gay in high school? Am still gay? Never been gayer, to be honest,” said Jongdae.  
  
It took five seconds for Baekhyun to absorb that information, another ten for him to process it, and three for his facial muscles to respond by his jaw dropping open and his eyes widening. “UM,” he said gormlessly, “YOU WERE GAY IN HIGH SCHOOL? YOU’RE GAY?”  
  
“What, you didn’t know?” Jongdae asked. He was pretty sure that practically everyone knew, and even if they didn’t, everyone seemed to be coincidentally gay nowadays. In fact, Baekhyun seemed to be the only straight person he knew. Gay was, like, the new black, and he briefly considered writing to Netflix to pitch his idea about a new television series. It’d be about a man in prison. A gay man. And the shenanigans he got up to with his friends. It would be Revolutionary and Totally Orange—uh, Original! “Sorry, I thought you knew.”  
  
“HOW??? WAS?? I?? SUPPOSED??? TO??? KNOW??” Baekhyun yelled, his face turning bright red as he choked on air. “YOU NEVER TOLD ME. NO ONE TOLD ME. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?”  
  
Jongdae was certain that he had told Baekhyun before. Or maybe not? It’d been a long time. He didn’t remember. Perhaps he had been too busy pining over his best friend and trying to control his hormones and the urge to wank every five seconds. But it was never too late to learn new things! You _could_ teach an old dog new tricks!  
  
“Chanyeol’s gay, too,” he supplied helpfully.  
  
Baekhyun’s eyes were impossibly round and he looked like he was about to have an aneurysm. “CHANYEOL’S GAY????”  
  
“Yeah,” said Jongdae. “He has a boyfriend.”  
  
“CHANYEOL HAS A BOYFRIEND????” said Baekhyun. “I cannot believe Chanyeol has a boyfriend. I cannot believe Chanyeol is _gay._ This is the same guy who chased girls’ skirts in the playground and talked about boobs _all the goddamn time._ I cannot believe Chanyeol is gay. I cannot believe he has a boyfriend. I cannot believe he’s found someone before me. What the actual fuck is this.”  
  
“I know, right?” said Jongdae. “[#FanficLogic](http://www.livejournal.com/rsearch/?tags=%23FanficLogic) [#tbh](http://www.livejournal.com/rsearch/?tags=%23tbh).”  
  
“This is so weird,” said Baekhyun. “Okay, like, I’m totally cool with the whole gay thing but…wow. Actually, thinking about it, Chanyeol was _waaaaay_ too straight to be straight. He was the kind of guy who tries to force it in your face about how much he likes boobs to hide the fact that he’s gay. Okay, I can actually believe Chanyeol is gay. I take that back.” And then, he paused and stared at Jongdae, letting out a breath. Jongdae could feel Baekhyun’s eyes trailing down his body and he swore Baekhyun’s gaze lingered for a moment on his crotch, which was a little bit disturbing, before he was shaking his head. “You, though…I’d never thought you would be gay. You don’t seem the type who would take co—umm, just. Nothing. Congrats on your…gay.”  
  
“Thanks,” Jongdae deadpanned. “Seriously though? You didn’t know? But you made testicle euphemisms and told me I’d meet my prince.”  
  
“Yeah, because most of my clients are middle-aged women!” said Baekhyun. “It’s a rehearsed speech!”  
  
“So I’m not special?”  
  
Baekhyun cleared his throat, having recovered from his earlier seizure, and he grinned at Jongdae. There was something feral about that smile; his eyes turned into crescents and there was a twinkle of something mischievous and not at all good. Something that looked a lot like trouble.  
  
“Oh no,” said Baekhyun. “You’re very special. I’m going to have a lot of fun with you.”  
  
Jongdae swallowed thickly.  
  
 _Oh no._  
  
  
  
  


☼

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Jongdae hated waiting in line.  
  
He had arrived just on time with the hope that he could still avoid the lunchtime rush-hour, but it was just his luck that the café was bustling with students and office workers, and surprise, surprise, there was no sign of a Very Hot and Also a Little Bit Emo (But I Swear He’s Really Nice on the Inside, Okay) boy, the guy Baekhyun had decided to set him up with. It probably wasn’t a good impression to make on a first date, being late and all, but by the time his date would get here, maybe the guy in front would finally stop wondering if an espresso would make his butt look big so Jongdae could order his ice caramel frappucino, _soy milk, please._  
  
First dates were always nerve-wracking, especially this one. The hum of people chattering and tapping away on their laptops did nothing to calm his worries; to say that he was nervous would be an understatement. He was probably somewhere more along the lines of Absolutely Shitting Myself Right Now, Txt It XOXO. It was just that he hadn’t been on a date for so long, not since he’d dumped Kim Joon-my-mom-is-a-syphilitic-whorebag-myun a year ago, that he didn’t really remember how these date-things were supposed to go. He’d gotten the first part down, the whole meeting in a coffee shop thing, the cliché of clichés, but he didn’t have high hopes for the rest of it. All he had to do now was, like, not fuck this up, which was a lot easier said than done because he pretty much fucked up everything he touched. Or looked at. Or breathed on. Or breathed near. Or breathed within a five mile radius. And so on.  
  
Eventually, the line moved forward as the boy decided that an espresso _would_ make his butt look big and ordered a fruit smoothie instead, and Jongdae glared daggers into his back when he sauntered out the door with a smug look on his face. Making other people miserable was supposed to be _his_ thing, dammit! So this was what it felt like to be Chanyeol, Jongdae realised as he bought his drink and a slice of dairy-free cake and sat down at a table in the corner to have another one of his philosophical and deep epiphanies in peace. It was hard work being Swag Jesus, but once again, he reminded himself that this was a burden he had to shoulder. This was his fate. Like Jesus, he was destined to walk this path alone (it should be said that Jongdae had never read the Bible; this was what he could remember from eighth grade and Sparknotes). He had no time for boyfriends—  
  
Okay, maybe he had time for that Very Hot and Also a Little Bit Emo (But He Was Probably Really Nice on the Inside) boy who had just walked into the café. Maybe.  
  
“Hey!” he called, loud enough to be heard over the crowd. The boy turned around at the sound of his voice; he stood up from his table and waved the boy over.  
  
Closer up, Jongdae could see his hotness in perfect 1080p. Very Hot and Also a Little Bit Emo boy was tall, towering over Jongdae’s small frame, and he had that sexy, mysterious air about him, like a sexy, mysterious anime protagonist who sat in the back of the classroom and had a passion for katanas and lovingly stroked his sword in bed with a somewhat attractive disregard for health and safety. His hair was jet-black, falling over his forehead in a choppy fringe, and his eyes were dark and almost feline, slightly deepset and framed by a pair of oversized glasses. Jongdae imagined him to have a deep, husky voice that would sound like a cross between melted chocolate and Morgan Freeman, and imagined how he would sound in bed because he was a small, sexually frustrated man and he thought about these kinds of things.  
  
The boy smiled at him and gestured that he was going to order a drink, and fuck, his hands were gorgeous. Jongdae wondered how many of those fingers he could fit up his ass until he would have to call A&E, and closed his eyes to thank Baekhyun for sending him such a Hot and Also a Little Bit Emo boy. _Thank you, Baekhyun. I was wrong. Love is real. Thank you. I am forever in your debt._  
  
People were starting to filter out of the café; by the time the boy came back and sat down, a latte and a salad in his hands, it had quietened down enough so that the jazzy, Bossa Nova piano could be heard in the background.  
  
“Hey,” Jongdae said, smiling. “I’m Jongdae. It’s nice to meet you.”  
  
The boy parted his lips to talk; they looked perfectly soft and were curled up in a kittenish, playful grin Jongdae braced himself. This was it, the moment of truth. “Hi,” the boy said. “I’m Zitao.”  
  
 _FUCK YOU, BAEKHYUN._  
  
Jongdae hoped that he was tactful enough to hide his True Emotions under a tight-lipped smile because _what the fuck,_ Zitao’s voice was…not what he had been expecting. Instead of a deep, sexy anime protagonist voice, Zitao had the voice of a moe, jailbait little sister, the wrong kind of anime protagonist. But Jongdae was not one to judge by people’s voices. Perhaps Zitao had a wonderful personality. Perhaps he helped his onii-chan cross the road and turned into a magical girl to fight evil in his spare time. Jongdae took a few deep breaths to calm his Must Shove Fork into Eye urges and grinned at Zitao. He would not judge Zitao. He would be nice to Zitao because at least he knew that he wasn’t looking for a serious relationship with him and maybe Zitao would turn out to be a good friend.  
  
(Key word being ‘maybe.’)  
  
“Sorry I was late,” said Zitao. He was flicking his thumb on the lid of the coffee cup in his hand out of habit and Jongdae thought about his fingers again. Maybe they could make this work if Zitao was into, like, BDSM and didn’t mind if Jongdae gagged him during sex. “Did you have to wait long?”  
  
“Not really,” said Jongdae, shaking his head. “Don’t worry about it. Let me guess: did your friends coerce you into doing this as well?”  
  
Zitao laughed. Jongdae prayed that he would be into gagging. “Actually, I went to 100VE myself,” he said a bit embarrassedly. “I want to find love. But I’m guessing you don’t?”  
  
“I’m just here for the free lunches, to be honest,” Jongdae admitted, and Zitao laughed again.  
  
Jongdae launched into conversation; he asked all the generic questions, the _how are yous_ and the _where are you froms_ and the _what kind of stuff are you intos,_ and in the span of thirty-odd minutes, he realised that Zitao was a rather strange person. Zitao was ‘exotic,’ as he had put it (he was from China, Qingdao, near the coast), and he liked Deep Poems and Haruki Murakami was, like, his bae, and he was interested in fashion (but he only thrift-shopped because he was hipster like that) and music (but only shitty, indie bands because good music was too mainstream for him and he was hipster like that) and cute boys (but only in coffee shops because he was hipster like that).  
  
Jongdae was beginning to regret ever seeing Baekhyun. He should’ve never taken Chanyeol’s advice. This was probably the worst first date ever. Once Zitao had gotten comfortable with him, he’d also gotten extremely obnoxious. Zitao was probably the most obnoxious hipster ever and he had a weird fixation and kept staring at Jongdae’s cake whilst picking at his salad.  
  
“I’m on a diet,” Zitao sighed wistfully. “I gained, like, half a pound yesterday. I’m so _fat._ ”  
  
“Hey, don’t be like that,” said Jongdae. “You’re not even fat. You don’t need to diet.”  
  
Zitao sighed again, like he talked exclusively in sighs. “But I do! I’m so obese.” Sigh. “I need to diet to fit into society’s twisted ideals of self-image!” Sigh. “You wouldn’t understand.” Sigh. “You don’t understand me.” Sigh. “No one understands me.” Sigh. “Being understood is too mainstream.” Sigh. “Hashtag, sigh.”  
  
“Oh,” said Jongdae. “Well, good luck on your diet, then.”  
  
Another sigh. “Yeah, thanks,” said Zitao. He sighed again.  
  
Fuck it. If Zitao wasn’t going to eat, that didn’t mean Jongdae wasn’t. Fuck Zitao and his salads; Jongdae had a cake and he was going to eat it, no matter how mainstream that was. He poised his spoon, ready to dig in, when Zitao quickly yelled, “STOP.”  
  
Jongdae swore he just peed himself a little bit. “Oh, Christ, what is it?” he asked, hoping Zitao wouldn’t go on another one of his rants about how sexy hipster vegans were.  
  
“INSTAGRAAAAAAM,” said Zitao, whipping out his iPhone and snapping an unnecessary amount of photographs of his salad and Jongdae’s cake at different angles. “You can truly feel the forbidden love between the salad and the cake,” he said, “like Romeo and Juliet. One is a salad. The other is a cake. They can never be together.” He wiped at his eye. “A true love story. OTP. Now, which filter should I use?”  
  
The Must Shove Fork into Eye urges were getting stronger. Jongdae did his breathing exercises and thought about bunnies and rainbows and ponies as Zitao listed off the pros and cons of each filter.  
  
“Are you done?” he asked after a while when Zitao was busy trying to pick the best filter to bring out the colour of the leaves in his salad. “Am I free to eat?”  
  
“WAIT,” said Zitao. He reached over with his fork and took out a chunk, popping it into his mouth. “Ooh, that’s tasty.”  
  
Jongdae’s urges were becoming harder to suppress. Soon, it would consume his entire body. He would become a fork-shoving monster, and his first victim would be Zitao. He would make sure of it. And if he didn’t come out of this alive, he prayed to God to tell Chanyeol that he wasn’t allowed to take his PS4. His character on Grand Theft Auto, SEXYCAMEL92, would be his legacy. Kim Jongdae, 1992 – 2014: Fucked Bitches and Got Money.  
  
“I thought you were on a diet?” he said through gritted teeth, trying to sound as pleasant as he could whilst wanting to rip Zitao’s head off.  
  
“I am,” said Zitao. “I ate it _ironically._ ”  
  
“How exactly do you eat something ironically?”  
  
“…You just do, okay! It’s a metaphor, see?” Zitao insisted. “You put the fattening things right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its fattening. Hence, I only ate one piece. I did not give into the power of the cake. I don’t conform to the system. That’s too mainstream. I’m fighting against the government. Metaphorical anarchy.”  
  
Jongdae just massaged his temples and wondered if Zitao would mind if he shoved a spoon up his nose.  
  
(But _ironically_ , of course, because he was hipster like that.)  
  
  
  
  


☼

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
It was late, around eleven, when Jongdae got back to his apartment from his date in the afternoon and the extra shift he’d picked up from the sushi restaurant in the evening. They’d been short on cash recently, him and Chanyeol, because Chanyeol’d been too preoccupied with helping Jongin run his illicit doggie day-care centre to write songs; Jongin’d been too preoccupied with running an illicit doggie day-care centre to nag Chanyeol to write songs; Sehun’d been too preoccupied with getting manicures to even know that Jongin was too busy running an illicit doggie day-care centre to nag Chanyeol to write songs; and Kyungsoo’d been too preoccupied with planning out his next homicide on unsuspecting _Zelda_ game files every time Chanyeol called him their ‘groupie’ to nag Sehun to nag Jongin about running an illicit doggie day-care centre.  
  
Sometimes, Jongdae hated his life. This was one of those times.  
  
He really did love his friends (arguable, especially when he was drunk and-slash-or pissed off—often, they weren’t mutually exclusive) but god, they could be the most obnoxious asses. If he’d had a choice, he would choose to elope with that sexy Chinese idol, Zhang Liyin. Who cared if she was a girl? She was a goddess and he would not hesitate to say that he would turn straight for her. Item eight on his bucket list was to have all of Zhang Liyin’s illegitimate babies, all ten bajillion of them, and item nine was to become to Selena Gomez-Justin Bieber power couple of the Asian music industry, minus the Brazilian prostitutes and the inevitable break-up. But alas, fate was cruel. Instead of having a sexy domestic relationship wherein they shared a bank account and control over the thermostat, he was stuck with this ragtag band of morons due to the following:  
  
  


_ **FOUR REASONS WHY KIM JONGDAE WAS FRIENDS WITH A BUNCH OF BUMBLING NEANDERTHALS: A COMPREHENSIVE LIST** _

  
  
  
  
**1.** Chanyeol was pretty much the most useless person on Earth, except when it came to music, being the lead guitarist and composer for EL D★RADO. Jongdae had thought out many scenarios wherein he and Chanyeol were not friends, and in most of them, Chanyeol ended up setting himself on fire from the gas cooker or slipping in the bath, breaking all his bones and eventually starving to death whilst lying in a big white tub with adhesive umbrellas on the surface. As much as Jongdae liked to tell himself that he hated Chanyeol, he didn’t want Chanyeol to die before he turned thirty because he was a small, angry, and occasionally sexually frustrated man, not a sociopath.  
  
 **2.** Jongin was their bassist and Chanyeol’s boyfriend-slash-Best Friend [#2](http://www.livejournal.com/rsearch/?tags=%232)-slash-evil mastermind behind the illicit doggie day-care centre so by default, he was Jongdae’s friend too. Also, he served as eye-candy for the group and Jongdae admired, if not envied, his magical power to strip off his shirt whilst rocking out some sweet basslines on his vintage Fenders Jaguar.  
  
 **3.** Sehun could make good pancakes and anyone who could make good pancakes automatically got a pass in Jongdae’s book. He was also kind of their drummer, but that didn’t really matter because pancakes!  
  
 **4.** Kyungsoo was their call-me-a-groupie-again-and-I’ll-punch-you groupie and Jongdae was too scared of him to delete him on Facebook. He was in charge of supplying lunchtime snacks and telling them to shut the fuck up when they were being too loud.  
  
  
Currently, two of the four Bumbling Neanderthals were in his apartment, looking intently at the computer screen. Chanyeol had been missing for a few days, but Jongdae hadn’t thought anything of it. They’d probably just eloped to Jongin’s illicit doggie day-care centre because neither of them had the balls (or the money) to do anything hardcore, like go to Las Vegas and get married to a potato chip, which he knew was one of Jongin’s lifelong dreams.  
  
Chanyeol was sitting in his desk-chair with Jongin perched on his lap in a woollen turtleneck, arms around Jongin’s waist and chin propped on Jongin’s shoulder, and Jongdae could hear him murmuring into Jongin’s ear, his mouth breaching the required minimum of six centimetres of distance for communication at hushed levels of volume. They were being disgustingly couple-y, which Jongdae did not approve of. Happiness was banned in this household—either both of them were happy, or neither of them. Jongdae was not happy. Chanyeol was. This was a blatant violation of Jongdae’s rules and he intended to have harsh words with Chanyeol about it. That was second on this evening’s agenda, but first—  
  
“The king is home,” Jongdae announced, throwing his coat onto the sofa and kicking his shoes off to the side. “What are you guys doing?”  
  
“Looking at wholesale knitted booties for Jongin’s illicit doggie day-care centre— _NOTHING,_ ” they both said simultaneously. Jongin whirled around to give Chanyeol an icy look.  
  
“Nothing,” Chanyeol said mildly.  
  
“Suuuuuure,” said Jongdae, heading straight for kitchen make himself a cup of hot chocolate because today had been totally hectic. Their apartment was small, a one-room studio that they’d rented out with a separate bathroom, and he could see Jongin throwing a mini hissy-fit over the breakfast bar as he heated up some milk. ‘Dysfunctional’ was not quite the word to describe their relationship, he thought. It was more like they were two kindergarten kids trying to be in an Actual Adult Relationship in the Adult World and somehow making it kind of work because they were both as useless as each other. “I just remembered that I couldn’t give less of a rat’s ass about what you two lowlifes get up to. Which reminds me: now that you’re back, shouldn’t you be working, Chanyeol? There’s a thing called ‘money’ and you have to ‘work’ to earn it so you can buy your stupid dog shoes.”  
  
“We’re not buying dog shoes,” Jongin said, quickly clicking off Google Chrome. “We’re just. Playing Minesweeper.”  
  
“Playing Minesweeper isn’t any more productive than searching for cheap booties on eBay,” replied Jongdae, rolling his eyes. “Seriously, Chanyeol. Any progress with the whole songwriting thing? As much as it pains me to say this, the wellbeing of my wallet depends on you.”  
  
Leaning back in his chair and stretching his arms, Chanyeol yawned and rubbed at his eyes. Jongdae knew Chanyeol had been tired lately, stressed from a lack of inspiration because his creative juices hadn’t been flowing and he couldn’t churn out any cliché emo lyrics, and he felt slightly bad for pressurising Chanyeol, but they needed a gig soon or they wouldn’t be able to pay this month’s rent, not if Jongdae managed to pick up more hours at work and Chanyeol went out busking as a one-man freak show.  
  
“Writer’s block,” said Chanyeol. “I haven’t been as inspired as usual. And besides, I don’t see why we can’t just use our old songs. Oldies but goldies, you know?”  
  
Jongdae snorted into his mug of chocolate. “What, the ones you wrote in high school and college?” he asked. “You mean ‘So Fucking Emo, Not Scene’ and ‘If You’re Horny and You Know It, Jack Your Hands?’ Oh god, what was the other one again? ‘You Don’t Understand Me, I’m So Depressed?’”  
  
“My favourite is ‘The Booty and the Beast (Wolf),’” Jongin said. “It was majestic.”  
  
“They’re _all_ majestic,” huffed Chanyeol indignantly, “because I wrote them. ‘So Fucking Emo, Not Scene’ is probably my greatest work. It’s, like, some postmodern Beethoven shit. Actually, it was inspired by you, Jongdae. I think I wrote it in high school when you were going through your _Baekhyun is so hot omg im crying I LITERALLY CANT_ phase. It’s an elegy for your boner.”  
  
“Yeah, about that,” said Jongdae. “I have a bone to pick with you. You fucking set me up with Baekhyun, you asshole! Did it never occur to you that you maybe should’ve told me first before I had, like, seven heart attacks?”  
  
“I did tell you!” Chanyeol retorted whilst Jongin let out a terrified squeak and headed straight for the bed, a mattress and a futon pushed together on the floor, diving beneath the sheets and pulling the pillow over his head. “Jongin, we’re not fighting. Jongdae’s just being stupid because I did tell him. I distinctly remember I said, _uh, hey, Jongdae, remember Baekhyun? Well, guess what?_ and you said, _oh yes, I totally remember because I wanted to bone him so hard in high school!_ ”  
  
“Yeah, in _high school_ ,” says Jongdae. “It’s been, like, eighty years! I’m over him now. You’re a horrible best friend.”  
  
“Lies,” Chanyeol said with an affronted gasp. “I’m the best best friend. I sleep in the same bed as you. I know everything about you. I hear everything. _Ooh, Daddy! Baekhyun! Spank me harder!_ ”  
  
“Shut up,” Jongdae grumbled. “The date didn’t turn out well anyway. Zitao’s a complete and utter ass. Baekhyun’s shit at his job.”  
  
“Oh, sucks to be y—wait, what? Who’s Zitao?” Chanyeol asked. “I thought you and Baekhyun were gonna…y’know. Get together and resolve your unresolved sexual tension.”  
  
“There is no sexual tension. He’s straight, Chanyeol. He likes girls. I like boys. Who aren’t him. So you can see where your little plan went wrong,” Jongdae said, draining the last of his hot chocolate and stomping over to the bed, flopping onto his futon. “Shove over, Jongin. Chanyeol, if I had a door, I’d be angrily slamming it right now. I’m metaphorically slamming a metaphorical door into your stupid-ass face.”  
  
“Whatever. I did tell you,” said Chanyeol. “But Zitao…how did it go? The date, I mean. Was he hot?”  
  
“He was extremely hot. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for his personality,” Jongdae said, sighing. Sigh. Communicating in words was too mainstream for Jongdae. He sighed. “He’s so obnoxious. He kept telling me how hipster he was and he. Ate. My. Food. I’m not letting my Nemo be some friggin’ emo hipster.”  
  
Sigh.  
  
“He doesn’t sound too bad,” said Chanyeol. “I think you’re just being picky.”  
  
“I’m not,” Jongdae said. “I told you. I’m not interested in a relationship right now. I don’t even know why I’m doing this. I’m calling Baekhyun first thing tomorrow and telling him that the deal’s off.”  
  
Chanyeol looked at him, hard, and narrowed his eyes. He looked Extremely Serious for a moment and it kind of scared Jongdae because Chanyeol was never serious, not unless it involved Cheetos or Jongin. “You can’t do that.”  
  
“Why not?” Jongdae shot back.  
  
“Because,” said Chanyeol, and then he paused, his voice becoming quiet, “it’s like you’re not even trying to be happy.”  
  
“I am happy,” Jongdae said. Chanyeol frowned at him. “Look, relationships don’t equal happiness. You know that _I_ know that firsthand. I’m happy just being alone, okay?”  
  
“But you’re not,” said Chanyeol. “You’re not happy. You think you are, but you’re not. Maybe you can’t see it, but I can. You’re not happy, Jongdae. You’re _lonely._ ”  
  
And that really pissed Jongdae off; just because Chanyeol was in a relationship and had found the love of his life and was all happy and shit with his illegitimate puppies and his stupid puppy boyfriend and his super rich resident in _Animal Crossing,_ he thought that he was some superior being, some demigod of love, who could tell Jongdae what to do. Who thought that he was hot shit, who thought that he knew everything about love and relationships, when Jongdae knew the truth: ‘love’ was stupid. ‘Love’ was supposed to be thing that everyone wanted; people said that ‘love’ was warm and happy and it gave them a reason for living, but all ‘love’ had done for Jongdae was hurt him. And the thing that pissed Jongdae off the most was that even though he didn’t believe in ‘love,’ not anymore, a part of him still knew that Chanyeol was…right.  
  
So maybe he had exaggerated a tiny bit when he had said how amazing being single was. Maybe he hadn’t been telling the entire truth, like the part where he saw Jongin and Chanyeol cuddling up on the couch and his heart ached for something like that too. Or the part where he saw Kyungsoo standing up on his tip-toes and Sehun smiling down at him endearingly before they kissed like it really _meant_ something, and Jongdae felt this immeasurable emptiness inside of him that could only be one thing: loneliness. At first, he’d thought it’d been great, the newfound freedom and just the taste of being single, knowing that no one could hurt him in the way that he’d been hurt before, the absolutely soul-crushing, eleven-out-of-ten pain of The Breakup, and then, as he’d stared up at the ceiling at night, unable to sleep and feeling strangely heavy even with all the hollowness inside of him, he had found himself missing it all. Because now he knew: once you’d had a taste of ‘love,’ no matter if it were real or not, you’d never be able to get enough.  
  
And he’d called Baekhyun ‘stupid,’ a stupid conman who believed in stupid things like _Nic Cage is a good actor!_ and ‘love,’ but really, he was envious of Baekhyun because Baekhyun was a person who seemed to really believe in ‘love,’ even in a world so corrupted and broken as this, and Jongdae was just another one of those cynical, lonely bastards; monochrome, black, and empty as his heart.  
  
“You’re wrong,” said Jongdae. It felt like a lie in his mouth, sounded like a lie to his ears.  
  
Chanyeol chewed on his lower lip in thought, eyes unwavering. Finally, he rolled the chair away from the desk and stood up, grabbing his coat from the rack by the door. Jongdae prepared himself for an argument; instead, Chanyeol just said, “I think I’m gonna stay over at Kyungsoo’s tonight.”  
  
He walked out, closed the door behind him—didn’t slam it, but closed it purposefully, and somehow that hurt more—and didn’t look back once. Jongdae buried his face in the pillow. Fuck. He’d fucked this up. Everything seemed to turn out this way and he was sick of it, being such a fuckup, fucking up every _fucking thing._  
  
“Are you okay…?” Jongin asked softly beside him, and Jongdae turned his head to the side, blinking away the wetness in his eyes to see Jongin’s head popping out beneath the covers. Jongin was looking at him worriedly, reaching out a tentative hand to stroke Jongdae’s hair.  
  
“Yeah,” said Jongdae, sniffling a bit.  
  
“Hmm,” Jongin said, like he wasn’t really convinced, but thankfully, he let it slide anyway. “If it helps, I, for one, thought Chanyeol was being a total and utter ass. Everyone has a different definition of happiness. The only person who knows if they’re truly happy or not is themselves, so just ignore Chanyeol, okay? If you think you’re happy, then you’re happy. And I’m happy for you.”  
  
Jongin ran his fingers through Jongdae’s hair until he drifted off to sleep, buried underneath his blankets. It was nice to see that someone still had faith in him, Jongdae supposed, even though Jongin really was wasting his time for believing in something that Jongdae had long given up on.


	2. Chapter 2

Soft.  
  
Soft was the first thing that came to Jongdae’s mind as he sifted his fingers through black hair. Soft, soft, soft, and silky, twisting his hands tighter and jerking his hips up, pushing into that warm wet heat of someone’s mouth. Their face was blurred; he couldn’t quite make out who it was, but goddamn, he couldn’t give less of a shit because their lips felt heavenly around his cock, red and slick from being stretched, and Jongdae was so close, almost teetering off the edge. It was as if the boy lived to suck dick; fuck, he was good at it, a kittenishly flicking at Jongdae’s slit, then laving the underside with the flat of his tongue, pressing against the vein of his cock.  
  
Jongdae had no qualms about being rough. It was obvious that the boy could take it, that he liked it, even, and he gave as good as he got, hollowing his cheeks around the length of Jongdae’s cock and slowly, slowly, slowly inching down until his lips were wrapped around the base, hands dug into the flesh of Jongdae’s ass to hold him there. Jongdae moaned between shallow breaths—he didn’t know whose name he was moaning but by now, everything came out as a garbled mess—and bucked into the heat, the tip of his cock hitting the back of the boy’s throat. Everything constricted around him; around his cock, around his chest as he struggled to inhale because _oh god, it was so good, so good,_ around his gut where the coil wound tighter and tighter and—  
  
He woke up with a start, drenched in his own sweat and a discernible stickiness in his pants that he knew all too well.  
  
Taking a few breaths to calm himself down, he pushed his hair out of his face and rolled over to see an empty space next to him. There was no sign of Chanyeol or Jongin, who Jongdae assumed had gone back to his own apartment last night, and no sign of the mysterious black-haired boy with the Amazing Blowjob Skills, which, by now, had just become an amorphous cocksucking blob. It hadn’t been Zitao, he knew that for sure, but he supposed that there was no point in lingering on that matter. It had been a dream, after all. A very graphic one, but a dream all the same.  
  
His phone was lying next to him, the green LED light flashing periodically. He switched it on to check the time—11:43—and found two messages waiting for him, one from Baekhyun asking to meet up with him, a progress report of sorts, and a motivational message from Jongin with an abundant amount of smiley emojis and exclamation marks. Jongdae smiled to himself and got out of bed on shaky legs, waddling to the bathroom to clean himself up.  
  
After a quick shower, he made himself a simple breakfast of coffee and some leftovers he found in the fridge that tasted like regret and food poisoning, and bummed around the apartment for a bit until he set off to Baekhyun’s office, a ten-minute drive away in his brother’s shitty, ten year old Toyota.  
  
Sexually explicit dream aside (Jongdae really needed to get laid, and soon), last night had been eventful. It wasn’t often that Chanyeol got mad at him. That was the beauty of their friendship—they almost never argued because Chanyeol was just chill about everything and Jongdae didn’t really care unless it concerned Chanyeol taping over last night’s recorded episode of _Korea’s Next Top Twinkdol._ However, they would have to apologise to each other sooner or later because they couldn’t avoid each other forever, not with the whole best friend-roommate-mortal-enemy thing. He would wait for Chanyeol to apologise first, though, because it was the least Chanyeol could do when Jongdae’s dignity was smaller than the pepperoni slices he shoved into his mouth every Saturday night. Chanyeol couldn’t take his pride away from him too. That would just be cruel.  
  
Bumpy car rides with the slightly worrying creak of metal every time he hit a pothole were always the best times to have Deep Moments of Self-Reflection. What Chanyeol had said yesterday—maybe Jongdae wasn’t trying hard enough to be happy. It was easy enough for Chanyeol to say that when he already had Jongin, but maybe he did have a point. Perhaps it would be good for him, this dating thing. Which was like, woah, because he kind of prided himself on being a firm disbeliever in ‘love.’ ‘Love’ was too mainstream for him and he was just unique and hipster like that.  
  
He parked his car a few streets away because Baekhyun’s office was in a rather prestigious area and he didn’t want people to see him coming out of his piece of shit car—he liked to call it ‘retro’—and walked the rest of the way to the block where Baekhyun was probably thinking about vaginas and other straight boy things up on the fifth floor. Today, there was a new person sitting at the reception; he was handsome with a kind face, the sort where his eyes smiled along with his mouth, and he beamed when Jongdae approached him.  
  
“Good afternoon,” he said politely, obviously a trained greeting, but the way he said it sounded genuine, like he really hoped Jongdae was having a good afternoon. He seemed like a cool guy, Jongdae thought. Maybe Jongdae would slip him a few free tickets to his next gig. “How may I help you?”  
  
“I’m here to see Baekhyun,” said Jongdae.  
  
“Ah, Mr. Byun,” the receptionist said knowingly. “Do you have an appointment?”  
  
“Yeah, it should be under the name ‘Kim Jongdae’?”  
  
At the mention of his name, the receptionist’s eyes lit up and his smile grew impossibly wider. “Ah,” he said again, “Kim Jongdae. I’m Yixing, Baekhyun’s secretary-slash-Cool Friend. I’ve heard so much about you. It’s nice to finally meet you.”  
  
He stood up and leaned forward, taking Jongdae’s face in his hands. Jongdae wasn’t the most touchy-feely person—he neither hated nor loved it—but Yixing was blatantly invading his personal space, tilting Jongdae’s face up, to the left, to the right, and down, inspecting every inch. After a few seconds, he pulled away and nodded in satisfaction.  
  
“Okay, come with me,” he said as if he hadn’t just done a Very Weird Thing, and Jongdae followed him towards the elevator. Baekhyun just had to be friends with all the strange ones, didn’t he? “Baekhyun should be going for his lunch break soon. If you want, I can recommend a great Italian restaurant. They’ve got couple lunch specials and everything.”  
  
“We’re not a couple,” said Jongdae. “We’re just friends from high school.”  
  
“The way he looks when he talks about you though—oops. Never mind,” Yixing said. “Ignore that. Uh. Never mind. Forget that I said anything. Wow, look at that! We’re here already!” The door slid open and Baekhyun was standing there, admiring his own reflection in the shiny metal. Yixing pushed Jongdae out, shoving him into Baekhyun, and waved cheerfully. “Have fun, kids!”  
  
“Umm,” said Jongdae, half-sprawled and caught in Baekhyun’s outstretched arms, “hey, I guess.”  
  
“Hello,” said Baekhyun. “Having fun down there?”  
  
“Oh yes,” Jongdae said, “so much fun.” As an afterthought, he added, “No homo.”  
  
“No homo taken,” Baekhyun replied, and belatedly, Jongdae realised that he kind of liked falling into Baekhyun’s arms, all slow-motion anime love scene. He had always liked Baekhyun, both platonically and romantically, and in Baekhyun’s arms, he felt particularly hyperaware of it. In high school, of course. He’d liked it _in high school._ “Now, if you’re done with whatever this is, shall we proceed to lunch?”  
  
“Right, sorry,” said Jongdae hastily, bouncing out of Baekhyun’s arms and straightening up his shirt with a light blush on his face. (Shut up.)  
  
Baekhyun just looked amused and gestured to the elevator. “Ladies first,” he said.  
  
“Oh, swoon. Your gentlemanly manners have knocked me off my feet,” said Jongdae, entering first.  
  
“Rather literally,” Baekhyun said as he pressed the green ‘G’ button on the number-pad.  
  
Jongdae couldn’t quite will the flush on his cheeks away when they reached the ground floor and Yixing wriggled his eyebrows at him suggestively from behind the receptionist’s desk. He tried not to think about what Yixing meant when he’d said something about the way Baekhyun looked whenever he was mentioned. It was probably a slip of the tongue. Yixing looked like the flaky type anyway. But thinking about _not_ thinking about what Yixing had said made him think about Baekhyun instead, and trying to will himself not to think about Baekhyun made him think about Baekhyun even more, in the same way that you didn’t really notice that you were breathing until someone pointed it out to you and then you couldn’t stop noticing it.  
  
Thinking about Baekhyun was bad. Baekhyun was bad. This was bad. Jongdae didn’t think he could go through it all again, the unrequited love and wanting something that he knew he could never get because Baekhyun would never like him in the same way as he liked Baekhyun. Used to like Baekhyun, back in high school. And just when he’d managed to put himself back together, he couldn’t let everything fall apart again.  
  
But if he were careful about this, then maybe it’d be okay. He was no longer a teenager, uselessly pining after Baekhyun. He knew what it felt like and if it became too much, he would back off. Besides, when he wasn’t trying to set Jongdae up with egotistical sighing emo kids, Baekhyun was a good friend. That much had stayed the same from high school.  
  
His taste in good restaurants hadn’t changed either. Before, they’d used to hang out together after school at this Chinese takeout, which served great jjajangmyeon, under Baekhyun’s recommendation. This time, Baekhyun had picked a cosy diner tucked away in one of the quieter streets, a quaint place where a pretentiously cute waiter served pretentious little sandwiches on pretentious little plates with pretentious little cups of pretentious Italian coffee. It wasn’t the type of place that Jongdae would usually go to but Baekhyun was paying and Jongdae was never one to turn down free food.  
  
Between bites of his cucumber sandwich (Baekhyun eyed him with mild disgust), Jongdae began to recount, in great detail, his date with Zitao. Zitao’s severe lack of punctuality. Zitao’s severe lack of sexy, deep man-voice. Zitao’s severe lack in his ability to be, like, a decent human being, and his excessive irony regarding cakes and Instagram filters. Jongdae made sure not to miss out a single detail because Baekhyun needed to know that he had made a Huge Mistake and if he ever set Jongdae up with someone like that again, their friendship would be Over. And then, after a moment of hesitation because he wasn’t really sure if he wanted to know the answer, he asked, “Do you believe in ‘love’?”  
  
Baekhyun sent him an affronted look. “Of course,” he said. “Love is greatest thing we have.”  
  
“But sometimes, it hurts,” said Jongdae. “Everyone talks about ‘love’ like it’s a new Johnny Depp film, like it’s some huge thing that makes them feel all happy and warm inside but sometimes, it just hurts. Don’t you just ever feel like giving up? Don’t you ever just stop and think, _what’s the point in all this?_ Or if it’s ever worth it? Everyone’s looking for something they can’t even see. Or touch. Or own. Doesn’t it ever make you wonder if it even exists at all?”  
  
It was a while before Baekhyun replied; or rather, a few seconds that felt like eternity as Jongdae watched Baekhyun blow out a stream of air, sending slight ripples through the bubbles of foam on his coffee. It was oddly calm for an afternoon, a little bit cloudy with the sun just peeking out between wisps of white that made the light glow on his face in a way that would be perfect with an Amaro filter, hashtag like4like, hashtag likethisifyoucryeverytime.  
  
“Sometimes, it’s difficult,” Baekhyun finally said. “It’s like…a journey. Like, maybe you’ll hit a few bumps along the way and maybe sometimes it won’t work out the first time. Maybe it won’t be perfect the first time, or the second time, or the third time, but you gotta keep trying, you know? I don’t think we’ll ever be able to fully understand what love is, but that’s the beauty of it, isn’t it? Because maybe we don’t know what we’re looking for, but eventually, we’ll find it anyway. Red string. Fate. Destiny. You don’t have to believe in those things, but I think you have to believe in love.”  
  
“Huh,” said Jongdae. “I guess I’ve never thought about it that way.”  
  
“Love,” Baekhyun said firmly, “is the purest thing out there. Love is the thing that makes us thrive. When you finally find the person who makes your Monday mornings suck a little bit less or gives you a reason to wake up tomorrow, it must be the best feeling in the entire world.”  
  
“And that’s what you really think?”  
  
Baekhyun’s hand was lying in the centre of the table, his nails bitten to the ends and his fingers tracing the patterns of the oak table, and it’d be so easy to just reach across. Lace their hands together. Lean forward, feel Baekhyun’s sunkissed skin beneath his fingertips, find the thing he’d been searching for since high school. Jongdae felt a yearning, an unexplainable want, and this weird, deep sadness settle in his gut because he knew exactly what he was looking for. He’d been searching for his Nemo and he’d found it halfway through his first year, and right now, it was right there, barely centimetres away—  
  
But.  
  
“It’s not what I think,” Baekhyun said. “It’s what I know.”  
  
There was always a ‘but.’  
  
A quiet settled upon them as Baekhyun sipped at his coffee and zoned out, probably thinking about love and vaginas and his love for vaginas and other straight boy things, whilst Jongdae mused over what Baekhyun’d said. For Jongdae, ‘love’ was the worst thing in the world because everything he’d ever wanted was in front of him, glaringly obvious and almost tauntingly so. And people wrote about this stuff, stupid unrequited loves and tragic relationships, in songs and in stories, as if it were some Romeo and Juliet romance, like this pain was something to be desired, but when it came down to it, ‘love’ just…hurt. Not in a good way, not in a bad way; it was a plain, unadulterated hurt that made everything numb, like someone had thrown him into a dark and inky space with an unending emptiness all around, and goddammit, this was what he’d been reduced to, wanting to kiss Baekhyun in a stupid, pretentious café and making stupid, pretentious star metaphors.  
  
And he couldn’t stop thinking about what Chanyeol had said. Things were getting complicated and he just wished things were back to how they’d been before, back to the days where the only thing he had to worry about was who would be the one to die next in Game of Thrones.  
  
“You know, Chanyeol told me that it was like I wasn’t even trying to be happy,” said Jongdae, deciding to tell Baekhyun about his fight with Chanyeol. Baekhyun had always been closer to Chanyeol than he had in high school and since Baekhyun was all philosophical and deep, perhaps he could offer some Keen, Heterosexual Insight on the situation. “I don’t even know if I’m happy anymore. How exactly can you label ‘happiness’? Do you…do you think he was right?”  
  
Baekhyun merely grunted in response, sounding entirely dispassionate. Jongdae looked up from his tiny plate, ready to kick Baekhyun’s shin under the table, when he noticed that Baekhyun was distracted by something. He wasn’t listening at all, busy staring intently past Jongdae’s shoulder with a seemingly great interest. Jongdae turned around; behind him was the cute waiter again, bending over to wipe one of the tables clean. It provided a great view of his butt, all perky and round and clad in a pair of tight black slacks, and as nice as that was, Jongdae didn’t understand why Baekhyun found it so fascinating. As a person who was decidedly into boys, he could understand why he thought the butt was cute. As a person who was decidedly _not_ into boys, he could not understand why Baekhyun was acting like the butt held the solution to war and starvation, unless—  
  
“Oh. My. God,” said Jongdae with a scandalous gasp. “You’re _gay._ ”  
  
“Huh?” Baekhyun said, snapping out of his butt-induced reverie. “I’m not—I’m not gay. I like girls.”  
  
“Sure,” said Jongdae, “which is totally why you’ve been staring at that guy’s butt for the past, like, fifty years.”  
  
“I just have an appreciation for nice booty, okay?” Baekhyun replied in protest. “I don’t discriminate. I appreciate all butts, regardless of their gender or their race or their age. Butts are universally the greatest things in the world. I love them all. And I love boobs. Because I like girls.”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“Boobs are sexy.”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“Girls turn me on.”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
“Vaginas are cool.”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
Baekhyun let out a sad whimper. “Why don’t you believe me!?”  
  
“Sure I do,” said Jongdae.  
  
“No, you don’t!” said Baekhyun. “You’re judging me with your sandwich and your gross cucumbers! Your cucumber is judging me so hard right now!”  
  
“Aww, penis euphemisms. That’s so cute,” Jongdae cooed. “You’re so straight, Baekhyun.”  
  
“I AM STRAIGHT AND I LIKE GIRLS AND BOOBS AND VAGINAS TURN ME ON,” Baekhyun said loudly, slamming his hands on the table. The cute waiter turned around and raised a judgemental eyebrow before he turned away and walked back to the kitchen, butt sashaying from side to side. Baekhyun’s eyes widened and he looked guiltily at the floor. “Okay, maybe I’m a little bit gay.”  
  
“Just a little bit?”  
  
“FINE,” said Baekhyun. “I AM A LOT GAY. DICKS RULE. ARE YOU HAPPY NOW? YOU’RE SUCH A PAIN IN THE BUTT.”  
  
 _I wish I was,_ Jongdae thought, but saying that out loud would probably break Baekhyun’s fragile heterosexuality so instead, he just said, “Yeah, your pain is my happiness.” Finding out that Baekhyun liked boys made him hope a tiny bit that Baekhyun would like him, but ultimately, he knew that it would never happen because Baekhyun seemed to be paying more attention to the butt behind Jongdae than Jongdae himself. He had to stay calm, like a sexy monk full of sexy zen. He had already reached enlightenment back in the summer of ’12 when he had accidentally walked in on Chanyeol showering. “You weren’t gay in high school, were you?”  
  
Baekhyun shook his head. “I was just confused during high school, I think,” he said. “I liked someone, but I didn’t think they’d ever like me back. And I spent a lot of time in college just trying to...find myself. Trying to find who I really was.”  
  
There was that warm feeling in Jongdae’s chest again, as he watched Baekhyun play with his fingers coyly, shyly, and the familiar flutter in his stomach returned from almost five years ago. And he couldn’t—he forced himself to breathe, inhale-exhale, and forced himself to think properly—because he knew that everything he wanted, he hoped for, would break him, as if he had a sick, masochistic indulgence, and he couldn’t do this.  
  
He cleared his throat, cleared the thoughts away from his head. “Well, anyway,” he said, “welcome to the club. Your apparent love for cocks aside, about the Chanyeol thing. Do you think he was right?”  
  
“I wasn’t even listening and even I can tell you that he was wrong,” said Baekhyun. “Remember, Chanyeol’s the guy who kept saying how much he loved pussy in high school and now look at him. Just give this a try, okay? Let’s call Zitao a beta test. Now we know what you like and don’t like, i.e. Very Hot and Also a Little Bit Emo boys. I’ve got a great guy for you next. You’ll love him, I swear. He’s just your type. I mean, well, he has a dick, so.”  
  
Baekhyun’s hands were fiddling with the hems of his sleeve and he was trying to look anywhere but the waiter’s ass as he came back from the kitchen and leaned over the counter in a way that ought to be illegal, and Jongdae couldn’t help wondering what it’d feel like if Baekhyun’s hands were held in his. Baekhyun really had no idea. No idea at all.  
  


 

 

☼

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
His second date seemed to be more promising, luckily.  
  
Baekhyun had really outdone himself this time. Jongdae was meeting someone he knew only by the name of ‘Kind of Scary but Really Sexy’ in a downtown Chinese restaurant this time, picked by his date, and Jongdae was glad to see a tuft of blonde hair sticking about two feet up from the rest of the crowd. They were both on time, for one thing, and there was no sign of any obnoxious hipster shenanigans going on. He’d had enough hipster to last him a lifetime.  
  
The boy grinned when he recognised Jongdae; he waved Jongdae over, and oh god, he was hot. Sharp eyes, a tall nose and a small mouth that fit strangely well with the rest of his ridiculously attractive face. He looked a little bit intimidating but as Jongdae drew closer, his eyes softened into crescents and he smiled, showing his gums, and Jongdae felt his insides melting into a pile of lovestruck goo. He could definitely get used to that endearingly gummy smile, he thought, which was mostly because it was like a big _fuck you_ to Chanyeol that he was trying to be happy, actually. As hot as the boy was, though, Baekhyun had a tendency to pair him up with the difficult ones, and with his blonde hair and his almost regal features, the boy didn’t quite look Korean. Jongdae wondered if he could even speak it and approached him nervously, trying to remember all of his high school English classes.  
  
“ _H-hello,_ ” he said in English, taking a seat in the opposite chair.  
  
The boy’s face lit up. “ _Oh, you speak English?_ ” he asked excitedly. No, Jongdae did not. He had a bad feeling that the boy didn’t know that. “ _Cool! This is great! I’m Kristofer, by the way!_ ”  
  
“Uh,” said Jongdae, racking his brains for everything he’d learnt in English 101, “ _yes. Um, my name is Jongdae. There are four people in my family. How are you?_ ”  
  
“ _I’m good,_ ” said Kristofer. _“I’m great! You speak English! This is so great, seriously!_ ”  
  
“Uh,” said Jongdae as he pulled out his phone under the table and frantically texted the token designated English speaker of his friendship group, Kyungsoo. _KYUNGSOO HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP CODE RED!!_ “ _Yes._ ”  
  
“ _Are you hungry?_ ” Kristofer asked. Despite Jongdae’s initial thoughts of _HOT AND SCARY,_ Kristofer actually seemed to be a pretty chill guy, ignoring the fact that he didn’t notice that Jongdae could speak English about as fluently as a sixth grader. “ _I didn’t know what you liked so I hope this is okay. Should I order some food? Here’s the menu. Pick whatever you want. I’ll pay so don’t worry!_ ”  
  
“ _Um, you choose,_ ” said Jongdae, expertly (and ironically) avoiding the question, not because he did not know how to answer, but just because answering questions was too mainstream.  
  
He soon found out that Kristofer, as well as being incredibly hot, was also incredibly smart. He had a pair of round glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, making him look like the sexiest librarian ever, and began to ramble on about something Jongdae couldn’t even understand throughout lunch. Jongdae responded with generic answers like _yes_ and _no_ and _my family has foUR??? PEopLE????¿¿¿¿¿???,_ which he had told Kristofer about ten times but he was thrifting jokes from 2012 because he was hipster like that, and he threw in the occasional nod like he knew what was going on because he was fancy like that. He caught bits of conversation, making out vague _politics_ and _economy_ and _cant sleep…jet laggin’_ and _coooool,_ when in all honesty, he had no clue what Kristofer was even talking about.  
  
“ _Hey, we should exchange numbers!_ ” Kristofer suddenly piped up.  
  
Jongdae choked on a beansprout. No, Kristofer couldn’t possibly be that smart if he still couldn’t tell, even when Jongdae had been talking about the four people in his family for two hours. But when in doubt, nod and smile, so Jongdae just nodded and grinned and said, “ _Yes,_ ” because YOLO, even though on the inside, he was thinking, _SHIT FUCK POOP??????? KYUNGSOO REPLY YOU SONUVABITCH!!!!!!_  
  
“ _Swagaroonie,_ ” said Kristofer, beaming at him. He scribbled his number on a napkin and their hands brushed as he passed it across the table, just for a second, but it made Jongdae blush slightly anyway, like the disgustingly hormonal thirteen year old boy he was. Perhaps they could just be one of those couples that never spoke to each other because actions spoke louder than words anyway and—yeah, okay, no. He’d gotten himself into a right pickle. Damn. Well, there was only one thing for it.  
  
“ _My family,_ ” he said, “ _has four people._ ”  
  
  
  
  


 

☼

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
They were all hanging out at Kyungsoo’s apartment, small but still comfortable, at Jongin’s insistence that they all needed an apartment to hang out at like in those American sitcoms and Kyungsoo had a real job and real money and could afford to pay his rent on time. He was an amateur author, remaining anonymous under the pseudonym ‘Dyodoro,’ who had shot to fame with his debut novel, _The Faults in Our Cars,_ a heart-wrenching story about a man, his love for a dying 1980s Corolla and the impact of global warming. It had been translated into eight languages already and made it onto the New York Times as a bestseller; people were calling him the new Murakami and critics said it was a ‘deeply insightful piece that will make you laugh, cry, and more eco-friendly.’ Kyungsoo himself thought it was a pretentious and overrated piece of shit novel, something he’d written that night when they’d all gotten drunk and thought it’d be a good idea to see who could piss in the bottle from five feet away, but having the extra money was always nice.  
  
“Hey, Jongdae?” Kyungsoo asked, and Jongdae grunted in response, too fixated on the anime he was watching with Sehun on T.V. “Why do I have, like, ten million texts from you saying ‘DUDE’?”  
  
“Oh,” said Jongdae, glancing over. “Yeah. About that. Teach me how to speak English.”  
  
“Okay, follow-up question: Why do you want to speak English?”  
  
“Oh, just”—Jongdae made a vague gesture with his hands—“y’know, to seduce hot foreign boys. It’s a long story.”  
  
“I don’t even want to know,” said Kyungsoo. As Jongdae had learnt, in this friendship group, some things were better left unquestioned. “Alright, what do you want to know?”  
  
“How do you say, ‘I want to suck your big cock’?”  
  
Kyungsoo looked at him.  
  
“I want to seduce him, okay?” Jongdae said, shrugging. It was a reasonable request, he thought. Kyungsoo was just a tight-ass. In both the metaphorical and literal sense, if the sounds he’d heard through the walls in his university dorm were anything to go by. “Come on, Kyungsoo. He was really hot and I made myself look like an idiot.”  
  
“And they say romance is dead,” Chanyeol remarked dryly from where he was sitting on the other couch, tapping on his phone. He called it ‘waiting for inspiration to strike.’ Jongdae and Kyungsoo liked to call it ‘You’re Being a Fucking Lazy Bastard and I’m Uninstalling Plants vs Zombies From Your Phone.’ They’d made up the other day, and although things were still a little bit tense, Jongin was like a buffer between them, lying across the seats with his head resting on Chanyeol’s thighs and his laptop on his chest as he edited an advertisement poster on Photoshop for his illicit doggie day-care centre.  
  
“Didn’t Jongin confess to you by sticking a taco to a Valentine’s card?” asked Sehun. “So romantic.”  
  
“NO,” said Jongin hurriedly, suddenly bolting up in a panic. “I MOST CERTAINLY DID NOT. DO NOT BE RIDICULOUS, SEHUN. HAHA.”  
  
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure you did,” said Kyungsoo. “Because I remember Chanyeol gushing about it for, like, ten days afterwards. Didn’t you write a poem too? Now, how did it go?”  
  
“ _Taco: An Ode to Park Chanyeol,_ ” began Jongdae in a dramatic voice. Jongin made a miserable gurgling sound in his throat and buried his face in Chanyeol’s lap. “ _My love for you is like my love for tacos: eternal and endless. You are the ketchup to my fries, the boneless to my bucket, the ham to my burger. Like this taco, I will stick by your side. I will love you always. I will never judge you. Even when we are old and past our expiry date, we will remember all the good times we had together. Despite my crispy and hard exterior, I am soft and tender on the inside. I will be there for you in the good times and the bad. My love for you is like my love for tacos. In spring, the swallows fly from the south. This has been an ode to Park Chanyeol._ The end.”  
  
“I hate you all,” said Jongin from Chanyeol’s dick, voice muffled.  
  
“No, you don’t,” Sehun and Jongdae chimed back at the same time as Chanyeol leapt up from the couch, not noticing that Jongin was curling into the foetal position on the floor and rocking back and forth whilst muttering, _I hate everyone. I hate you all. I am alone in this world._  
  
“I’ve got it!” Chanyeol said, having a eureka moment. He pulled Jongin up and shook him frantically as Jongin’s soul left his body. “I can feel it! The inspiration is coming back! The tale of a pure and true love—this is perfect! I need to release my creative juices! Jongin, come! We have a masterpiece to create!”  
  
“I am _not_ singing about tacos,” said Jongdae.  
  
“I am not drumming about tacos,” said Sehun. “Unless we’re changing our name to DEL D★TACO. And Kyungsoo wears a taco costume because he’s our groupie. Then I’ll reconsider.”  
  
“Kyungsoo, how do you say, ‘Chanyeol, your idea stinks and we’re not playing a song about fucking tacos’ in English?”  
  
“ _I’m finding some new friends,_ ” Kyungsoo answered.  
  
Jongdae nodded in satisfaction. “ _I’m finding some new friends,_ ” he tested out. “I like that. Hey, Chanyeol! _I’m finding some new friends!_ ”  
  
  
  
  


 

☼

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
It wasn’t particularly busy tonight. Jongdae was working the evening shift at the restaurant and it was nearing nine o’clock, the flow of customers thinning out. There weren’t many of them working on Tuesdays anyway but it was nothing that he couldn’t handle, and he prepared his best smile as two men walked into through the door, one taller one clad in sunglasses and a large black jacket, and the other, shorter and looking impressively surly at all the fish ornaments and the traditional Japanese music playing in the background.  
  
“Good evening,” Jongdae greeted, bowing at them. “Welcome to Black Pearl. Do you have a reservation?”  
  
There was something familiar about the taller boy’s smile and something deeply unsettling about the smaller boy’s scowl. “Um, yeah,” said the taller one, a slight twinge of an accent to his voice. He took out his phone; Jongdae stared at his hands in awe as it dwarfed his Note 3. “Yeah, for nine? ‘Kristofer Wu’?”  
  
“Alright, let me just—wait, Kristofer!?” Jongdae said, surprised.  
  
Kristofer took off his sunglasses, folding them shut and tucking them into his pocket, and grinned sheepishly. “Oh, it _is_ you, Jongdae. I thought I recognised you,” he said. “You work here?”  
  
“More importantly, YOU SPEAK KOREAN?” Jongdae yelped. Heechul, who worked over at the bar and was trying to sell alcohol to minors, gave him a disapproving look. Jongdae shrunk back meekly and said, quieter this time, “Sorry, I mean, you speak Korean?”  
  
“Yeah,” said Kristofer, “but I’m not really good at it. You speak English, though, right?”  
  
“Um, not really,” said Jongdae. He’d texted Kristofer a few times since their last date to arrange another date under the watchful eye of Kyungsoo and with the help of Google Translate, but he hadn’t actually told Kristofer that he couldn’t speak English yet. “I kind of can’t speak English. One thing just lead to another and I kind of messed up.”  
  
“Ah,” said Kristofer. “I can see where we’ve got a problem, then.” The boy next to him cleared his throat loudly and gave him a pointed look. “Oh, sorry. Jongdae, this is Luhan, my passive-aggressive and bitchy roommate. Luhan, this is Jongdae, my kind-of-but-not-really-boyfriend-person-thing,” he explained. “I owe Luhan a dinner because I used his straighteners and I didn’t put it back in the right place or something. You know how these passive-aggressive types are. So fussy.”  
  
“Excuse you,” said Luhan. “I put them right next to my desk. You put them ten centimetres away from my desk. That is not the same place. Check yourself before you wreck yourself.”  
  
“Yeah, so, passive-aggressive roommate,” said Kristofer.  
  
“Nice to meet you,” Jongdae said, feeling a weird sense of relief that Kristofer wasn’t cheating on him with a hotter, foetus-ier boy than him, even though they were in that limbo between kind-of-friends and kind-of-boyfriends. “I’ll show you to your table then. You’re still up for Monday, right?”  
  
“Definitely,” said Kristofer, “now that we’ll be able to converse without you telling me how many people are in your family. Three, was it?”  
  
Jongdae just laughed. He sort of missed this, the shy smiles and the way that they’d keep catching the other staring at them and quickly looking away with a secret quirk of the lips. Luhan, on the other hand, seemed to look permanently pissed at everything, sulkily stabbing at his sashimi, and Jongdae noticed how his stare lingered on Kristofer’s mouth every time he’d bite his bottom lip out of habit. He could understand Luhan’s feelings—he’d been through the same thing after all; the symptoms of an unrequited crush were obvious in Luhan’s apparent displeasure at Kristofer wanting to bang an ass that wasn’t his. But he didn’t feel bad enough for Luhan that he’d pass up a chance to meet Kristofer again for dinner, accepting when Kristofer told him that Luhan would be out tonight at their friend’s house and the apartment would be empty.  
  
He was trying now, trying to make this work because what Chanyeol had said stuck in his mind, making him wonder if he was really the one who was being unhappy. Wondering if he was bringing this upon himself and was too scared to admit it. And although he knew Baekhyun liked guys now, there’d never be a chance that Baekhyun would like him because they were friends. No matter what Yixing’d said, he couldn’t do this unless he was absolutely certain Baekhyun liked him. He couldn’t risk it again, especially when it was with Baekhyun.  
  
It was different with Kristofer. Kristofer was nowhere as close to his heart as Baekhyun was. If it didn’t work out with him, then it didn’t work out, but Jongdae would try, at least. And Kristofer was hot and Jongdae had always been a sucker for hot boys, giving into all of Kristofer’s signals, the eyebrow wriggles and the smirk on his lips as he pulled Jongdae into his apartment, into his room, kicking his shoes off and whispering into Jongdae’s ear, “Just so you know, you can call me ‘Kris’ when you’re screaming my name.”  
  
He kissed with a certain aggressiveness, a certain arrogance like he knew he was a damn good kisser, as he curled one hand around Jongdae’s jaw and held Jongdae’s hip with the other, skipping the soft and the slow, straight to the downright filthiness of tracing the seam of Jongdae’s lips and licking into his mouth, swiping over ridges at the top and the backs of his teeth. It sent shivers down Jongdae’s spine as he felt himself succumbing to Kris’s dominance completely, knowing that Kris could and would, soon enough, wreck him. Maybe it had just been too long since he’d had intimate contact with anyone (three fingers up his own ass was could never replace a good, ol’ dick) but he could already his cock hardening in his pants at Kris’s husky voice mumbling dirty things against his lips.  
  
He’d noticed it before, the size of Kris’s hands, and now, he was especially aware of how they were huge they were, long, slim fingers around his face, pressing hard enough to assert control, to mark his skin with the indents of the rings he was wearing. The other had drifted over to the button of Jongdae’s jeans, deftly popping it open as he pushed Jongdae up against the wall, his tall stature towering over Jongdae. Jongdae had always had a thing for being dominated and he loved how easily Kris could break him, how easily Kris took control and sucked hard on his tongue. Everything about him was dominating, from his height to his appearance to his aura, and as much as Jongdae liked it when Kris was nice and made dorky jokes and smiled his gummy smile, he found himself really liking how Kris was grinding up against him, hips moving sinfully.  
  
“Nice poster,” Jongdae managed to mumble out as Kris pulled away for a moment, just to topple them both onto the bed, falling with a thump. There was a huge picture of DBSK blu-tacked onto the wall, Yunho in the middle, posing like a typical early 2000’s boyband. Oh god, it was like the whole Nic Cage thing again.  
  
“Not mine,” said Kris, chasing Jongdae’s mouth as he crushed their lips together again, taking Jongdae’s bottom lip between his teeth. He pushed their hips together and Jongdae could feel his cock through the material of his pants, hot and hard, and he couldn’t wait for Kris to fuck him. It’d been so long that he was getting desperate. “Not my room.”  
  
“Your roommate’s?” Jongdae asked.  
  
Without breaking the kiss, without even looking, Kris had already undone the first few buttons of Jongdae’s shirt, exposing his deep collarbones and pale chest. The lights were muted, dimmed inside the room with a faint glow from the hallway, but Jongdae could still see the dark look in Kris’s eyes, pupils dilated and full of want, and god, it’d been so long. So long since someone had wanted him so much, so long since someone had wanted him like this. Perhaps it was a superficial and selfish want, both of them needy for pleasure, and Jongdae wondered if it really even mattered because in the end, that was what all ‘love’ was, a selfish want, searching for something for yourself. It didn’t really make a difference if he was in love with Kris or not whilst they did this because in the end, it was all the same anyway.  
  
“Yeah,” Kris gasped out, breaking the kiss. His lips were red and shiny with spit, catching the light, and he licked at them, his tongue peeking out, which made Jongdae’s breath hitch and his cock twitch, wondering how Kris’s mouth would feel around his cock. “Luhan’s room. He doesn’t like people on his bed.”  
  
“So this is just revenge sex?”  
  
Kris hesitated for a moment and looked a bit guilty. Jongdae kissed him again and laughed against his mouth. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I don’t mind. I think we both knew that this wasn’t going to go anywhere anyway.”  
  
He’d noticed Luhan’s lingering gaze, but he’d also noticed the way that Kris would gaze back at Luhan, tracing Luhan’s fingers tucked between his chopsticks delicately with his eyes, and the way he’d flick his gaze over at Jongdae quickly whenever Luhan was about to catch him staring. Jongdae hadn’t missed the way that Kris spoke to Luhan, leaning across the table so closely that their foreheads pressed together. To anyone else looking on, it might’ve seemed like they were just close friends, but close friends didn’t look at each other like that, not with their hearts in their eyes, and close friends didn’t talk to each other like that, not in hushed, secretive whispers and giggles like they were both in on some kind of joke that no one else knew.  
  
And maybe this was what Baekhyun had meant about being in love. Maybe this was what ‘love’ looked like; maybe ‘love’ was what Chanyeol and Jongin had. What Kyungsoo and Sehun had. What Kris and Luhan had, if they realised it. And it was what Jongdae would never have. There was once a time when he hadn’t understood why people yearned for the stars so much, wanted to find their own, when stars, in essence, were tiny specks in the sky, so far away that no one could ever reach them. Now, he realised that people could reach them; whether it was right next to them or if the journey was long and hard, making it even more worthwhile when they got there, it would be precious because—he hadn’t quite worked out that part yet, but he was sure that there was a reason why. After all, if Baekhyun believed in it so much, if seven billion people believed in ‘love,’ then he supposed that it was about time that he did too.  
  
“Hey, you okay?” Kris asked, waving a hand in front of his face. Jongdae snapped back to attention, blinking. “You looked kinda out of it for a sec. Are you okay? We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”  
  
Jongdae reached up and curled his hand around the nape of Kris’s neck. “I’m okay,” he said. “I want to do this. If you want to get revenge on your roommate, you should get it good.”  
  
Kris’s eyes widened and he broke out into a gummy smile, shaking his head. “You’re impossible,” he said, and then quieter, he said, “You know, I really wish that we could’ve been in love instead.”  
  
“Yeah, well,” said Jongdae, “sometimes we wish for things that we can’t have. So let’s enjoy what we do have.”  
  
“You’re right,” Kris replied, and before he could say anything else, Jongdae fisted his hand in Kris’s blonde hair, kind of dry and frazzled between his fingers, nothing like the black, silky hair he’d dreamed of, and tugged him down into a kiss, their lips melding together more softly, more tenderly than it had before. And Jongdae _so_ wanted to feel something other than the arousal in his veins, but…nothing.  
  
Soon, Kris was pulling his shirt down and off his shoulders and shrugging his own sweater off, adding to the growing pile of clothes on the floor. Jongdae raised his hips to let Kris tug his jeans down, and then, there was nothing between them, save for the thin material of their underwear. Jongdae could feel the heat, filling the almost non-existent space between their bodies, and moaned as Kris fluttered kisses and marks all over his collarbones and his neck, making him feel like he belonged to someone, even if it was transient and fleeting.  
  
He was hard when Kris took his underwear off, fingers slipping under the waistband to tug it down, his cock leaking and curved. Kris’s fingers were warm around his cock, sliding wetly with the precome that was dripping from his slit, and Kris jerked him off until he was moaning, a wrecked mess writhing on the bed. He spread his legs, bent at the knee, ready and willing, and he could hear the breath catching in Kris’s throat before he reached over for the bottle of lube in one of the drawers, coating his long fingers with the thick gel.  
  
Jongdae shivered at the first cool touch of Kris’s finger pressing against his hole, just tracing his rim. He moaned and pushed his hips back desperately, trying to get Kris to thrust it in, and then Kris did, his finger sliding in with little resistance. God, Kris’s fingers were so big, so long, filling him up more than his own ever could and dragging against his walls with a teasing slowness as he thrust in shallowly and pulled it back out to circle Jongdae’s fluttering rim, greedy for more.  
  
“Fuck, Kris,” Jongdae gasped, “more—more, fuck. I can take it.”  
  
“You sound like the perfect cockslut right now,” Kris said, his voice strained. “Do you fuck yourself with your fingers, Jongdae? How many can you take? Three? Four? Maybe your entire fist? I bet you’d like that, though, wouldn’t you?” He pushed in another finger alongside the first without warning but it just made Jongdae moan louder, his hands coming down to pump his own cock, thumb swiping over the slit in a way that made him cry out in pleasure. Kris’s hands were so much bigger than his own, felt so much better than his own. “Look at you. Look how greedy you are for my fingers. Lying on the bed with your legs spread, ready for my cock. Do you want me to fuck you, Jongdae?”  
  
Kris fucked his fingers into the hilt and Jongdae could feel the metal of his rings pressed up against his hole. He moaned out Kris’s name raggedly, feeling the coil build up in his gut, and then Kris crooked his fingers, pressing the pads against his prostate, and he sank his teeth into his arm to stifle a moan. He had always been a vocal one, not shy in expressing his pleasure, and he had always been sensitive to touch, every cell of his body on fire.  
  
“Fucking yes,” said Jongdae as Kris fucked him with his fingers, occasionally missing his prostate on purpose just to tease him, to keep him from toppling over the edge. “Two fingers—more, not enough. I need—I need your cock, please, oh god.”  
  
The room was filled with lewd sounds as Kris paid him no heed, adding a third finger. It stretched his rim, a tight fit, but the slight sting of pain made his cock twitch, leaking out pearly precome from the head and dripping down the side of his cock, red and swollen from being so hard. He felt like a string pulled tight, ready to snap at any moment, and if Kris would just _fuck_ him, then he wouldn’t be able to hold on anymore, he knew.  
  
When Kris finally did fuck him, he pulled out his fingers and wiped them clean on the sheets with a devious smirk, and rolled a condom down his cock, covering it with lube. He slid in easily, but his cock was so long and thick that three fingers hadn’t been enough to prepare Jongdae for it.  
  
“ _Oh_ ,” Jongdae huffed out as Kris pushed in, burying himself until his hips were flush against Jongdae’s ass. Jongdae’s legs came up to wrap around Kris’s waist, pulling him closer, and whispered, “Fuck me. I’m not a delicate little doll. Trust me, I can handle it. Revenge, right?”  
  
“Mmm, yes,” said Kris, kissing him messily. “You take cock so well. Let’s make this revenge a good one, eh?”  
  
“Fuck yeah,” said Jongdae, partly because he was always up for a little vengeance and mostly because Kris had started moving his hips salaciously, thrusting his cock in.  
  
Kris moved with a certain grace that he lacked in his everyday life; his movements were powerful but quick and fluid and Jongdae soon found him approaching the edge as Kris fucked him hard, his large hands pinning Jongdae to the bed by his shoulders. Kris wasn’t as vocal as him, more of a heavy breather, but he’d been right when he’d said Jongdae would scream his name. Jongdae’s voice was hoarse, his throat dry as he tried to breathe and moan at the same time, Kris’s cock driving right into him, so deeply and hitting that spot inside him that made lights burst behind his eyes, and he felt completely helpless under Kris’s dominance. He loved it, loved that he knew Kris could manhandle him like a ragdoll, fuck him however he wanted. Kris’s cock felt so hot and hard inside him, filling him up in a way that a vibrator couldn’t, and he came with a moan of Kris’s name, white come spilling over Kris’s fist wrapped around his cock.  
  
It was ironic, almost laughably so, that he was being fucked on the bed of the very person who wanted Kris to fuck him more than he wanted Kris to fuck him.  
  
Surprisingly, though, the afterglow ended up being Jongdae’s favourite part. Kris had reverted back to Hot But Extremely Dorky Canadian Doofus and apologised profusely for being so rough and scurried out, looking a little bit embarrassed. He came back with a warm, damp towel, cleaning Jongdae up, and Jongdae stretched his tired limbs with a contented sigh before Kris was lifting him up and out the room.  
  
“Not my bed,” he said, smiling sheepishly.  
  
Jongdae fell asleep pretty soon after that, passing out as soon as he hit Kris’s bed. Kris was warm and unexpectedly cuddling, like a huge teddy bear, and he woke up to his arms wrapped around Kris’s waist, his head tucked underneath Kris’s chin. Kris smelt nice, like old spice and cologne and sex, he thought. He would miss this. This was nice and it was so unfair that he couldn’t have this, but Luhan wanted it more, and he would rather have it be unfair to him than someone who really loved Kris.  
  
He yawned, blinking the sleep out of his eyes, and Kris stirred from his slumber like a great big bear waking up from hibernation, running his fingers through the tangles of Jongdae’s hair, which he’d fisted just hours back. Jongdae purred and buried his face in Kris’s chest.  
  
“Sleep well?” Kris asked, voice thick with tiredness.  
  
“Yeah,” said Jongdae. “You’re so warm. Like a human radiator.”  
  
Kris laughed, the sound rumbling in his throat. “Want to get up? Or sleep a little longer?”  
  
“Sleep,” said Jongdae. “But first…I think we have to do something about Luhan.”  
  
“What about Luhan?” said Kris questioningly as if he didn’t know.  
  
Jongdae scoffed. “C’mon. Don’t play dumb. Confess to him. He likes you. You like him. It’s a win-win situation. You’re roommates. I don’t know what you’re waiting for.”  
  
Pausing, Kris mused over it for a few moments and then he smiled, patting Jongdae’s head. “I guess you’re right,” he said. “I guess I was just scared…for nothing. Maybe we were just making things difficult for ourselves.”  
  
“’Cause you’re silly, like how it took you ages to figure out that I couldn’t speak English,” said Jongdae. “You can tell him later, though. I still want to sleep.”


	3. Chapter 3

As expected, things didn’t work out with Kris. Kris was a nice guy but it just felt wrong to be with someone that he didn’t feel anything for. His cock probably felt something for Kris, but his heart didn’t. It didn’t feel the way it should’ve when he’d kissed Kris, when he’d let Kris fuck him into the mattress, and maybe Baekhyun had been right about the whole ‘love’ thing. Kris wasn’t his Nemo because he wasn’t Baekhyun. There were different types of love, like a platonic love between friends or his love for pepperoni pizzas, but Jongdae wondered if you could only be _in love_ with one person. And if that were true, then fuck, he was screwed.  
  
“My life sucks,” he wailed, pillowing his head in his arms.  
  
Perhaps he wasn’t in the best place to be having a mental breakdown. He was sitting in Baekhyun’s office again, after the whole Kris thing had gone wrong, surrounded by a plethora of doggies in oversized argyle booties, courtesy of Jongin, and pink walls, which he hoped wasn’t a metaphor for, like, vaginas and the rebirth in his faith in love or something, and it wasn’t exactly doing much to calm his nerves. Neither was Baekhyun, who was leaning back in his desk-chair with his feet up on the table, playing _Anipang_ and pretty much having the time of his life because he wasn’t stuck in a perpetual unrequited love with one of his best friends.  
  
“Everything always goes wrong for me,” Jongdae said. “I hate my life.”  
  
“That’s not true. You met me and I’m, like, the best person ever. There, that’s one thing that’s gone right in your life,” Baekhyun pointed out. “If it weren’t for me, you would’ve never met Kris. And you would’ve never had your”—he gestured at Jongdae’s neck, littered with bite marks and bruises—“quite obviously carnal, animalistic sex. You’re welcome.”  
  
“Yeah, thank you so much,” Jongdae deadpanned. He’d debated wearing a turtleneck today to cover up the marks, but then, he’d had the dumb notion that if Baekhyun saw them, he’d be jealous and all cutely tsundere about it and they’d kiss and Jongdae would finally get the polyamorous relationship of his dreams—him, Zhang Liyin, and Baekhyun. He and Liyin would be the moneymakers with the Extremely Successful Musical Careers and Baekhyun would stay at home and look after their seven million kids and they’d all share a bank account and do sexy, adult things together, like worry about mortgages. “Nothing works out for me. What am I doing wrong?”  
  
He hoped that Baekhyun would say something romantic, like, _you’re not dating me!_ and would sweep him off his feet and carry him into the sunset on a unicorn, as depicted by one of the many unicorn paintings on Baekhyun’s walls; however, Baekhyun just sighed, set his phone down, and said, rather seriously, “I’d hoped that it wouldn’t come to this, but it seems like I have no choice. I’d seen the symptoms much earlier, but…”  
  
“’But’?”  
  
“You,” Baekhyun said, “are suffering from what I like to call ‘chronic shit-at-relationships disorder,’ wherein the sufferer—that’s you—suffers from being shit at relationships. The name is self-explanatory, really.”  
  
“And how do you suggest we cure this?”  
  
“There’s only one thing for it,” said Baekhyun. “What you need is a fluffer.”  
  
“Woah there,” Jongdae said hastily, holding his hands up. “I was told that this is a dating company, not some amateur porn studio!”  
  
Not that he would be opposed to Baekhyun sucking his cock; it was just that he’d prefer to take Baekhyun out on a few dates first, maybe charm him with his suave smiles and funny jokes to make him laugh, and impress him with his time trial record on Rainbow Road. And then, he’d show Baekhyun what a beast he was in bed (they’d start out vanilla though because Baekhyun didn’t need to know about his admirable dildo collection…yet).  
  
“Ew, no,” Baekhyun said. “Let me clarify that: what you need is a relationship fluffer. Basically, a relationship fluffer is like a practice boyfriend. A relationship fluffer will prepare you for the main event. They’ll help you fix any mistakes so you can have the perfect date without doing whatever you seem to do to fuck everything up. Sound good?”  
  
“This is actually one of your better ideas,” Jongdae said. “It’s a much better idea than that one time after exams had finished and you’d thought it’d be fun to get piss-drunk on liquor from your parents’ wine cupboard and play through all the sidequests on _Ocarina of Time._ ”  
  
“I fucking hate that game,” Baekhyun muttered. “Fucking Navi. I hate that bitch. _Hey! Watch out! Shut the fuck up!_ ” He took a deep breath. Talking about _Ocarina of Time_ always brought back bad memories for both of them. “Anyway. Fortunately, you’re going to get the best fluffer in the business.”  
  
“Oh god, please tell me it’s not Yixing.”  
  
“Even better,” said Baekhyun. “You’ve got me. Aren’t you lucky?”  
  
‘Lucky’ was not quite the word Jongdae would use. ‘Ambivalent’ was more fitting—there was a part of him that wanted to leap up and do a fist pump and cry with happiness because going on a date with Baekhyun had been one of his life ambitions since he had been a young, nubile teen, caught up in a first love. That side of him was the irrational, sort of insane side that usually only came out after a few drinks or the times when he would be feeling particularly nostalgic and would wistfully recall the happy memories of his teenager years, filled with masturbating to the thought of Baekhyun’s pretty fingers in his ass, blissfully unaware of what he would become in a few years’ time.  
  
And then, there was the other part of him that wished a hole would open up in the middle of Baekhyun’s pink walls and swallow him down because going on a date with Baekhyun would be all fine and dandy, but what would come after it would hurt, he knew. He would have a taste of what it’d be like to be in love—and what it’d be like if Baekhyun were in love with him too, fake or real—and after that, he’d never get to feel it again. That was the thing about ‘love’: you could never, ever get enough.  
  
This could go one of two ways: Baekhyun could either magically fall in love with him in the span of three hours and they would have cute babies and wear couple sweaters and shove their happiness all up in Chanyeol’s grill, or Baekhyun could unknowingly reject him and Jongdae would retire to a temple in the Himalaya Mountains and become a wise hermit, versed in the knowledge of _Grand Theft Auto_ and anime dating sims. He knew which one it would end up being and if he were smart, he’d say no to this utterly stupid, utterly dumb and utterly ridiculous idea to save himself the trouble.  
  
But he wasn’t, and it was Baekhyun, so he just smiled weakly and said, “Yeah, lucky me.”  
  
They agreed to meet up the day after tomorrow—or rather, Baekhyun made arrangements and Jongdae nodded and tried to look happier than the strange clash of emotions he was feeling—which left Jongdae ample time to stress over what the hell he was supposed to do.  
  
Chanyeol wasn’t in again; he’d started spending more time over at the recording studio, hopefully not writing song lyrics about falling in love with tacos, and Jongdae was left alone to eat away his emotions with two vegetarian pizzas to _Frozen_ , illegally torrented off the internet. This was what his life had become. Here he was, freaking out over a date with a tiny boy who had an obsession with Nic-frickin’-Cage and resorting to criminal activities. He had become the kind of guy that his mom had told him to stay away from when he was little. This date probably meant nothing to Baekhyun. Baekhyun had probably done this millions of times before. Jongdae was nothing but another minor character in the Big (and Now Gay) Musical of Baekhyun’s life, destined to be thrown away.  
  
Being Jesus Funky Christ was tiring and emotionally-draining work, he thought, as he stared up at the ceiling, getting so lost in the darkness that he wasn’t even sure if it was night-time or if this was just a horrible nightmare, until he heard the sound of a bell chiming outside a brightening abyss, soft at first, then growing louder and louder. Was this it? Was this the dreaded light at the end of the tunnel?  
  
“OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR,” the abyss called, beckoning him in. No….he couldn’t…he was too young…he had so much potential left…  
  
“FUCKING KIM JONGDAE, I SWEAR TO FUCKING—“  
  
Jongdae leapt out of bed, nearly tripping over the pile of clothes he’d left at the foot of his bed as he ran to the door. Shit. He kind of regretted eating all that pizza, but only kind of because he had a new appreciation for life after that weird dream and he had to live whilst he was still young and in control of his bladder. He skilfully hopped over an empty cup of instant noodles, dodged the mountain of shoes building up by the door, and reached the door, pulling it open with a triumphant smile.  
  
And there Baekhyun was, checking the time on his phone and tapping his foot impatiently, dressed in a crisp, white button-up and a pair of trousers that hugged his thighs. Jongdae felt his mouth go dry, felt the smile drop off his face as he replaced it with a poor imitation of a fish, gaping dumbly.  
  
“Close your mouth,” said Baekhyun. “You’re catching flies.”  
  
Jongdae opened his mouth to retort with a snarky comeback, and then he realised his mouth was already open quite embarrassingly and closed it silently. Fuck.  
  
“Please tell me you’re not going outside like this,” Baekhyun said, motioning at Jongdae in all his glory—a faded _Pokémon_ T-shirt that used to be his brother’s, a pair of boxers that had ‘JUICY BUNS’ printed across the back, and his hair sticking up in every direction possible. Needless to say, Jongdae was not looking his best. “I refuse to be seen with you like this.”  
  
“Actually, I just woke up,” Jongdae said meekly. “Sorry. I forgot. I had pizza last night, watched Disney movies, and things just got wild. I had a crazy night. I’m so, so sorry.”  
  
“Well, there’s the first problem,” Baekhyun said. “Bad punctuality. And from the look of it, awful fashion sense too.” He pushed past Jongdae, walking into the studio apartment, and gave everything a critical, judging look. Jongdae stared gormlessly at the empty space where Baekhyun’d been, slowly turned around and closed the door behind him, and then stared gormlessly at the space where Baekhyun now was.  
  
“Um,” he said intelligently.  
  
“Rule One of dating,” said Baekhyun, “is to always be prepared. Rule Two is to be ready to adapt to any situation. I’m adapting. We’re having the date here instead, as grody as your apartment is. God, how do you and Chanyeol even live? This is so gross.”  
  
“Um,” said Jongdae.  
  
Baekhyun shook his head and ushered him into the bathroom. “What are you waiting for? You wouldn’t go on a date dressed like that, would you? Hurry up and make yourself look less homeless. First impressions are everything.”  
  
Jongdae wasn’t entirely sure he knew what was happening, but he listened to Baekhyun anyway, going into the bathroom to brush his teeth and shower quickly, using the strawberry-scented shower gel because he remembered that Baekhyun had once liked a girl who smelt of strawberry fields and obsessed over her for months. Baekhyun sort of smelled like warmed coffee, the kind that swished about in a flask, and peaches, which Jongdae supposed was from his shampoo. Not that Jongdae had leaned in and had a good sniff and stored that the memory in the back of his mind or anything because that would be really creepy and Jongdae liked to think that he was only moderately creepy.  
  
He came out with a towel over his dripping hair and wrapped around his waist, suddenly feeling extremely self-conscious as Baekhyun sat by the counter of the breakfast bar with a water bottle he’d probably found amidst a jungle of unwashed plates and other unidentifiable crap. He tried to force the blush down from his ears and rummaged through his drawers to find some clean clothes, crouching in an awkward position to avoid being in the even more awkward position of bending over.  
  
“Like I said,” Baekhyun called from across the room, “first impressions are everything. You want to look your best. Simple but effective should work. Wear what you did on the first day we’d met up. You looked good in that.”  
  
This time, Jongdae couldn’t stop the blush from rising on his cheeks as he dug out his clothes and scurried to the bathroom to change, Baekhyun’s laughter trailing behind him. Baekhyun probably said that to be polite, which was probably, like, the eightieth rule of dating. He dried himself off properly and pulled on his shirt and his pants and smoothed back his hair until it looked acceptable and he didn’t look like he belonged in a cardboard box on the street.  
  
“We’ve seen each other naked before,” Baekhyun said amusedly as Jongdae returned and inconspicuously nudged some stuff to the side in an effort to make the place look a little better. Baekhyun was smiling, twisting his bottle-cap in with his fingers, and Jongdae stared at his feet as he made his way over, grabbing himself a glass and the carton of juice from the fridge.  
  
“That was before,” he mumbled. He was surprised that Baekhyun still remembered. He remembered, of course, that they’d been showering together after Chanyeol had made them both try out for the basketball team—and in retrospect, it should’ve been obvious after Chanyeol had said a little bit too enthusiastically, _I just loooooove playing with balls!!!!!_ —and the image of Baekhyun’s cock had stuck in his memory for days. He’d jerked off, cock in his fist, imagining Baekhyun’s dick up his ass, and it hadn’t helped that his hormones were using his body as a battlefield, his common sense raging war on his libido. “It’s different now.”  
  
“Different, huh?” asked Baekhyun, wiggling his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you’ve gotten a dick piercing, Jongdae! You kinky dog!”  
  
“No!” Jongdae said, flustered. “I just—!”  
  
“Jeez, I was just joking,” Baekhyun said, stifling a giggle with the back of his hand. “I’m just teasing you.” Jongdae glared at him, but it only made him laugh again, a somehow endearingly obnoxious sound. “Well, should we get started? I haven’t got all day, you know.”  
  
“Y-Yeah,” said Jongdae. God, he was stuttering. Normally, he was never this embarrassing near Baekhyun, but he felt nervous today, despite the fact that he knew this wasn’t a real date. “Um, so what are we supposed to be doing?”  
  
“Usually, you should take them out on a movie or something nice like that. That reminds me: Rule Three is always offer to pay. With any luck, they’ll insist on paying instead and you’ll get a free dinner too. That aside, I don’t feel like going outside today,” Baekhyun said. “What films do you have?”  
  
“Only old Disney DVDs,” Jongdae said. “But our television’s kind of shitty. I usually just watch them on my laptop.”  
  
“No problem,” said Baekhyun. “Remember Rule Two?”  
  
“Be ready to adapt?”  
  
“Exactly,” said Baekhyun. “You’re learning. What we’re gonna do is adapt. You’ve got _Mario Kart_ , right? God, it’s been so long since I’ve whooped your ass. I’ve missed hitting your punk ass with a green shell.”  
  
 _Adaptation._ Jongdae was beginning to suspect that Baekhyun was only here to freeload off him and play games, but he wasn’t complaining. It felt like how it used to; they both fought to be Yoshi and Baekhyun turned off the console in a fit when Jongdae picked him first so Jongdae chose Luigi instead. Jongdae’d had enough practice that he could complete every course and win with his eyeballs sold on the black market in a cosplay of Edward Scissorhands, but he still let Baekhyun win because Baekhyun just looked so cute and happy when Jongdae ‘slipped’ on his banana and hung around the finish line for ten minutes whilst Baekhyun climbed up from twelfth to eleventh. Halfway through the hour, Jongdae stopped playing properly, just mindlessly pressing buttons with one hand as Baekhyun had changed games to _Super Smash Brothers Brawl_ , and did that stupid yawning thing where he stretched out his arms and pretended to drape one over Baekhyun’s shoulders. Except that it didn’t really work because Baekhyun had gotten up to get his water and Jongdae’s arm flopped forlornly on the couch, all lonely and sad. And then, he tried putting his hand in the space between them, which didn’t work because Baekhyun was too preoccupied with making his Jigglypuff perform extreme gymnastics in mid-air to pay him any attention, so he shuffled closer until their thighs were pressing together and their knees were touching just the slightest. At that, Baekhyun paused and glanced over, and Jongdae put on his best nonchalant face as if nothing was happening and booted Baekhyun’s Jigglypuff off the stage.  
  
Revenge was sweet, but the pout on Baekhyun’s face was sweeter.  
  
“You know,” Baekhyun commented, punching Jongdae on the arm, “when you’re on a date, you’re always supposed to let the other person win.”  
  
“Yeah, you’re on a date with me. Thanks for letting me win, Baek,” Jongdae said.  
  
Baekhyun rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I just let you win. Don’t get full of yourself.”  
  
The movie-slash-bad-gaming-marathon was only the first part of a Good Date. The second part was a nice meal, which, by Jongdae’s standards, consisted of instant ramen and a three week old pot of half-eaten yoghurt in the fridge. Baekhyun eyed him contemptuously as he set the two cups on their small kitchen table, grabbing two spoons and two pairs of those wooden, disposable chopsticks he’d stolen from the sushi restaurant from the cutlery drawer.  
  
“What?” he said defensively, shrugging. “You’re the one who didn’t want to eat out. Don’t blame me.”  
  
“Chicken-flavoured, though? Jongdae, really?” Baekhyun said. “Chicken-flavoured?”  
  
“Don’t blame me,” Jongdae repeated. “This is your own fault. You brought it upon yourself. Rule Two, remember? Adaptation.”  
  
“I hate you,” Baekhyun whispered under his breath, stabbing at his noodles. “Rule Four: cup noodles do not qualify as a meal. But I’ll let it slide, just for you.”  
  
“How generous,” said Jongdae.  
  
“Yeah,” Baekhyun said. “Appreciate it. See, when you go out and have a nice dinner—you could’ve at least ordered takeout!—you have cool things to talk about! Like the origins of this 1950’s wine”—he gestured at his water bottle—“and that’s, like, the ice breaker! And as a bonus, you’ll look all sophisticated and intelligent and not like you sit at home all day, watching your shitty anime!”  
  
“Wow, thanks. That really helps my self-esteem.”  
  
“Oh, and another thing. Turtlenecks, Jongdae. They really help when you have you look like you’ve been mauled by a vampire.”  
  
“Again, thank you. Great advice.”  
  
“Hmm,” said Baekhyun. “I think we’re getting to the source of the problem here. Now, I shall teach you the art of polite dinner conversation. Generic questions and all that. Where do you see yourself in the future? Do you ever plan on getting married? What do you think you can bring to this relationship?”  
  
“Marriage? I’ve thought about it,” Jongdae replied. “I’m gonna marry Zhang Liyin and we’re going to adopt seven million babies together and live in a huge mansion with an indoor pool and a home cinema so I can watch _Doki Doki! Love Power!_ in full HD. That is American dream.”  
  
“Aaaaaand that where you’re going wrong,” said Baekhyun. He licked the soup off his spoon, his tongue darting out between his lips, and set it down so he could slam the table for Dramatic Effect. “You’re not supposed to say that. You’re supposed to say yes, and then something that’s, y’know, normal! Not, _uh, I’m gonna get married to some Chinese celebrity and have illegitimate babies!_ ”  
  
“I thought the most important part was to be yourself?”  
  
“No!” Baekhyun said, sounding shocked. “No, that’s the worst possible thing you could do. God, no, have you _seen_ you? You’re supposed to be someone who is polite and refined and knows a lot about wine on the first date so you can charm them! And when you’ve got them in your grasp, married with your two kids, Soojung and Jinri, only then can you reveal your true nature. By that time, you’ll be too invested in your relationship with your kids and your mortgages to split up. And there you have it. Your happily-ever-after.”  
  
“Are you joking…?”  
  
Baekhyun looked solemn for a moment, and then he burst out laughing, his grin as bright as the afternoon sun. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s not what you’re supposed to do. Rule five: never try to be someone else. If you try to be someone else, then they’re falling in love with that someone else and somewhere inside, I think you’d just know that they wouldn’t really be loving you anyway. Maybe just tone down the snark a bit. Being funny is attractive, but being weird isn’t.”  
  
“What you’re saying is that they should fall in love with who I am?”  
  
“Yeah,” said Baekhyun. “So don’t change for anyone until you find that person.”  
  
“Do you like me for who I am?” Jongdae asked slowly, wondering belatedly if he had crossed the line or made it too obvious what he was doing, why he was doing this.  
  
“Of course,” said Baekhyun. “It’s been a while, but you’re still one of my best friends. That’s why I told you. Don’t change. For anyone.”  
  
“What if…” said Jongdae. He swallowed thickly. Every part of his brain was screaming at him not to do this, but he had his heart in his mouth and fuck, he had to. He would’ve had to eventually, anyway. He could feel everything, the blood running through his veins as his heartbeat sped up, thudding so loudly against his chest that he could hear it in his ears, and Baekhyun was looking at him with those eyes of his, dark and beautiful, his lips frowning in confusion. He inhaled, air rushing into his lungs, and his ribcage tightened with a flutter in his gut, like he couldn’t exhale. “What if,” he said, “I’d already found that person?”  
  
“Then you should be brave. Tell them, because everyone deserves to be happy and he deserves to know,” said Baekhyun. The frown had disappeared, replaced by his lips pressed into a thin line, expression unreadable. “Where are you going with this, Jongdae?”  
  
“What if,” said Jongdae, leaning forward, leaning across the table, and god, what was he doing? What the hell was he doing, thinking that Baekhyun would—fuck. His body was moving of its own accord, every cell yearning, wanting, needing Baekhyun, and he balanced himself on his elbows, cupping Baekhyun’s face with one hand. Baekhyun’s skin was as soft as it looked, like silk under his fingertips, and Jongdae brushed his thumb over Baekhyun’s cheek where pink was starting to bloom as a blush. “What if that person was you?”  
  
Baekhyun opened to his mouth to say something, and then shut it again. Jongdae was staring at his lips, so perfect and pink, maybe a little bit thin, but Jongdae didn’t mind. Baekhyun’s tongue peeked out to wet them, even though they weren’t dry, and Jongdae watched as he swallowed his words, his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat. For so many years, Jongdae had dreamed of kissing Baekhyun, trailing kisses up his neck and marking his collarbones and his chest and his hips and every single inch of him until Baekhyun would be his. And maybe, finally, if—  
  
“Jongdae,” said Baekhyun, his voice barely audible, but Jongdae remembered how Baekhyun’s mouth moved when he said every syllable of Jongdae’s name. “Fuck. I’m sorry, I—“  
  
He pushed his chair away from the table, the wood sliding across the tiles with a deafening scrape, breaking the heavy atmosphere in the air, and grabbed his jacket from where he’d thrown it over the couch, heading straight for the door. It closed, clicked shut. Jongdae stared uselessly after him, the phantom sensation of Baekhyun’s skin on his fingers, the sensation of Baekhyun’s eyes staring into his. He slumped back into his seat, feeling entirely drained and…  
  
Numb.  
  
Just numb. Nothing. Nothing at all.  
  
And he wondered if that was really better.   
  


 

 

☼

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Chanyeol found him on the futon, still in his date clothes, lying on top of the blankets and staring listlessly up at the ceiling. He didn’t really know what to do, but that was okay because Jongdae didn’t know either. He tried calling Jongdae’s name, trying to get him to snap out of it, but there was nothing for Jongdae to snap out of because he wasn’t feeling anything. Sadness. Loneliness. He really wished that he could feel those things, but he just couldn’t. For a second, he thought he felt pain, so numb that it hurt, and then, it was blank again.  
  
Chanyeol settled down beside him and pulled the duvet over them both. It had an ugly Batman pattern, a housewarming gift from Kyungsoo when they’d first moved in. He ought to change that soon, Jongdae thought. Chanyeol pulled it up to their chins anyway and wriggled closer until their bodies were pressed together, Chanyeol’s cold hand intertwining with his, their palms touching.  
  
“Want to talk about it?” Chanyeol asked quietly. He’d only seen Jongdae like this once before when he’d broken up with Joonmyun. Chanyeol probably hadn’t expected to see it again so soon. Jongdae wanted to laugh but his lungs seemed like they’d stopped working.  
  
“Baekhyun rejected me,” said Jongdae, “so no, not really.”  
  
“Oh,” Chanyeol just said, unsure of what to say to that. A moment passed. Jongdae hadn’t pulled the curtains and it’d gotten dark outside. The moon wasn’t shining today, the stars hidden behind clouds of dust. “You know,” he murmured, “this is all my fault.”  
  
“Yeah,” said Jongdae. His throat felt tight. “Yeah, it is.”  
  
“I’ve kept in touch with Baekhyun since high school,” said Chanyeol. “I knew you hadn’t because of your crush and how you’d just wanted to get over it, and at first, that was okay. But then you started dating these _assholes_ and god, you were never in love with them. Maybe some of them, you loved, but you weren’t in love with them, not in the same way as you were when you were with Baekhyun. It just pissed me off so much that you couldn’t see that. And then, a while ago, Baekhyun told me that he was gay. And he told me that in high school, he’d liked you, except he hadn’t really been sure back then because things had been difficult and he’d been confused. And I’d thought that I’d had this genius idea, like, hey, wouldn’t it be cool if Baekhyun and Jongdae got together? And I’d thought that it’d be easy because you were already in love with him. Always have been. So I tried to set you two up, but then Baekhyun actually did his job properly, which I didn’t anticipate, and things just got complicated. I’m sorry, Jongdae. I just…wanted you to be happy. Truly.”  
  
“Fuck,” said Jongdae. His fist clenched and he brought his arm up over his eyes, a shudder running through his body. But he wasn’t crying. Fuck. He couldn’t cry; couldn’t even be pissed at the fact that he couldn’t cry. God, what was wrong with him? “I said I didn’t want to talk about it and look what you fucking went and did, Chanyeol, you asshole.”  
  
“Should I go?” asked Chanyeol.  
  
“Fuck,” said Jongdae. “You’re a fucking asshole, Chanyeol.”  
  
“I’ll go—“  
  
“Don’t,” said Jongdae. “You’re an asshole, but you can stay. Please…stay.”  
  
It was silent. Not even the birds were singing outside, like the whole world was dead. The stars were dead tonight.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Chanyeol said again.  
  
But ‘sorry’ couldn’t fix things. ‘Sorry’ couldn’t fix the fact that Jongdae had been so close, soso _so_ close to getting what he had wanted for so long, the fact that he’d let it slip between his grasp. Or rather, that it was never in his grasp.  
  
Maybe Baekhyun had liked him, once, but he had never loved him.  
  
  
  
  


 

☼

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
Kris texted him the week afterwards, sending him about five lines of smiley emojis on KakaoTalk and an animated dancing emoticon. Following that was an attached image of him and Luhan together, Luhan scowling at the camera as Kris pecked his blush-stained cheek. Jongdae smiled at photograph and sent him a happy face back, to which Kris replied, _:DDDDDDDDDDDDD btw lu says thanks :DDDD and also that he hates you because you got cum on his bed but mostly thanks :DDDDDDDDDDDDDD_  
  
 _Happy for you guys,_ Jongdae replied.  
  
 _hehe :3c im happy for me too!!!! :DDDDDDDD lu is looking over my shoulder rn and hes telling me to tell you to delete that pic and that he’ll kill you if you put it on fb. i don’t think hes joking. hes so cute when hes mad :DDDDDDDDDDD_  
  
 _Haha, wow :)_  
  
 _lol hes pouting now!!!! so cute :DDD btw howve you been??? whats been new w you?? still at 100ve??? :D_  
  
 _Err, not really,_ Jongdae typed. _Baekhyun and I kind of had a falling out. Nothing to worry about though! ^^;_  
  
 _oh…im sry ): cheer up though! things will get better! :D luhans bff is really cute, i think hes a waiter at a café somewhere?? want me to set you up?? ;)_  
  
 _I think I’ve had enough of blind dates…haha (:_  
  
Jongdae’s schedule was free today. No shifts at the restaurant since Chanyeol had agreed to pick up his slack and got a job working as a cashier at the nearby convenience store when he wasn’t scrawling song lyrics about tacos onto his arm, and Jongin offered to donate some funds from his illicit doggie day-care centre, which had been doing quite well. Jongdae politely refused because they could get by, for now, and besides, they all hung out at Kyungsoo’s and freeloaded off him instead so that wasn’t a problem.  
  
He hadn’t talked to Baekhyun ever since that day. Jongdae hadn’t tried to contact him when Baekhyun had made it obvious that he didn’t want anything more than a friendship, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to delete Baekhyun off his phone yet. The numbness was still there, a part of it, but he’d cried himself out when Chanyeol had cuddled up next to him, his long, gangly arms wrapping around him, weirdly comforting, and pressed his head to his chest, soothing him as his shoulders shuddered with every sob. He still felt shit, but less shit now, and kind of good, in a strange way, because at least he had the capacity to still feel shit.  
  
His phone buzzed thrice, signalling notifications, and he glanced down to check the messages, wondering how many other ways Kris could find Luhan adorable and cute.  
  
 _lol i guess youre right!! :D but we should meet up again soon :D i want to be friends. let me buy you a dinner for making krislu happen!!!! :D_  
  
 _sry luhan wanted me to tell you that its lukris not krislu because he tops ok even though we all know that’s not truuruijoiroo8383932043jiufedskfdg,f jgjjjjjjjjjj_  
  
And then: _Hey, I don’t know if you still have my number, but it’s Baekhyun. What are you doing today? Can I come over? I think we should talk._  
  
This was what Jongdae had been dreading. The We Need To Talk talk. Jongdae knew that he needed closure. The only thing he didn’t know was whether he was ready for it. He inhaled deeply, his fingers shaking as he typed out, _Okay. Can you come over in an hour?_  
  
He didn’t know if one hour was long enough to prepare himself, but he’d sent it now and Baekhyun replied almost immediately with an _okay_ back. Jongdae got up, stretched his legs, feeling them loosen up, and answered Kris’s message with a laughing emoji before he downed a glass of water and raided his wardrobe for an outfit that wasn’t a stripclub’s casual Friday—topless and Spongebob boxers, which he was sure were Chanyeol’s (sharing was caring). He changed to a T-shirt, and then wondered if that was too casual, then pulled a button-up on, and wondered if that was too formal, and then chose a sweater with a geometric print, wondering if that was too, uh, Dad.  
  
However, before he could change, Baekhyun was knocking on the door and Jongdae almost tripped over his feet to open it, hoping that he didn’t look too flustered. He aimed for the cool, apathetic look, like he didn’t really care what had happened because he was cool and apathetic like that. Being riled up over things like that was too mainstream for him.  
  
“Hi,” Baekhyun greeted, standing awkwardly by the door. He was dressed in slightly oversized band shirt and a pair of jeans, hands dug into his pockets and his Converse trainers scuffing the floor. He looked worse than he did a week ago; there were circles under his eyes that he hadn’t bothered to cover with concealer and his skin was pallid. Jongdae didn’t really mind. He probably looked the same anyway. “Are you gonna make me stand here all day, or…?”  
  
“Oh,” said Jongdae. “Of course not. Come in.”  
  
He closed the door as Baekhyun walked in, slipping his shoes off to the side and sitting at the kitchen like he’d done just days before. Jongdae felt a sick feeling rise in his throat, but he pushed it down and took a seat as well, hands fiddling with the frayed ends of his sleeves.  
  
“We should talk—“ Baekhyun began, but Jongdae cut him off.  
  
“No,” he said. “I have something to say first. I don’t really know how to say this. I’ve been thinking for a week about how to say this, and every time I go over it in my head, it doesn’t ever sound quite right. But I’ll try.” He took a deep breath and looked down at the table. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to put into words how I feel about you. You know I’ve liked you ever since high school, right? And honestly, I’d thought it’d been one of those dumb crush things and you didn’t even like boys anyway do I thought I’d just find someone else. But no one else was right for me because no one was you; no one else made me feel the same way you made me feel, and then, I kind of knew that you were…You were my Nemo. That time, what was it that you’d said? That everyone has someone who makes their Monday mornings suck a little bit less. That’s you, for me, every day, every second. Every second I’m with you is infinitely better than every second without you, and it just—it just sucks so bad that I can’t have that.  
  
I just felt like I had to say this. And you probably don’t even feel the same way and I’m probably just being stupid, but I just had to say this. For closure. For a while, I’d wondered if you’d been looking for me too, but now, I think I know that I’m just another blip in your life. I think I probably know the answer already, even if it’s bad, even if there’s no chance for us.”  
  
He covered his face with his hands, feeling that numbness again, all over. “I’m gonna close my eyes so I don’t have to see you leaving. If this is goodbye, then I don’t want to see.”  
  
He waited for Baekhyun to tell him, _I’m sorry_ , and for the tell-tale click of the door shutting. An endless silence passed, and then he felt Baekhyun’s hand patting his arm, coaxing his hands away from his eyes. Jongdae reluctantly uncovered them to see a silly, wide smile on Baekhyun’s face and his eyes all dewy and happy in a way that he’d seen before, he realised. In the way that Baekhyun looked when he saw Jongdae.  
  
“Jongdae,” he said softly. His voice was barely a whisper. “If I told you that I’ve been in love with you for the longest time, what would you do?”  
  
“Um,” said Jongdae. “I don’t—I don’t know. I…would kiss you, I think. I’ve wanted to kiss you for a very long time. And then I’d kiss you again and again and again until I’d get tired of kissing you, but I don’t think I ever would, and then I’d tell you that I love you.”  
  
“God,” said Baekhyun, “you’re cheesy.” He rose a little bit so he could lean across the table like Jongdae had done, and took one of Jongdae’s hands, lacing their fingers together. He curled his other hand around Jongdae’s face and inched closer and closer and closer until Jongdae could feel Baekhyun’s breath on his skin, making him tremble.  
  
“Well then,” said Baekhyun, fluttering his lashes, “isn’t this the part where you’re supposed to kiss me?”  
  
“But you didn’t tell me that you loved me,” Jongdae said. Baekhyun’s lips were so close, slightly shiny with that little mole Jongdae had always adored, and he smelt like coffee.  
  
Baekhyun just grinned. His smile was like a sunbeam. “I don’t think I have to tell you,” he said, and Jongdae’s eyes widened, “because I think I’ve just found what I’ve been looking for all these years.”  
  
“Love?”  
  
Pressing their foreheads together, Baekhyun tilted his head to the side just _so_ so that their noses wouldn’t bump together, and Jongdae tilted his too so they would. “You,” said Baekhyun.  
  
“Oh,” said Jongdae.  
  
Baekhyun’s mouth was close, an immeasurable distance between them. ”What are you waiting for?” he asked.  
  
“…Nothing,” Jongdae said.  
  
And this was it. The thing he’d been looking for. Waiting for. And the thing he’d finally gotten.  
  
He pressed his lips against Baekhyun’s and his eyes fluttered shut. Baekhyun’s fingers curled against his skin, curled into his hand and dug his nails in, marking crescents beneath Jongdae’s knuckles. And Jongdae felt everything, all at once; stars burst behind his eyelids in a galaxy of black, a flutter and a swooping in his gut increasing tenfold as Baekhyun’s lips curved against his and his teeth tugged ever so slightly on Jongdae’s bottom lip, barely breaching the barrier of chaste. Jongdae cupped the nape of Baekhyun’s neck, stroking the short hairs there and revelling in the shudder that ran through his body.  
  
Maybe it wasn’t quite perfect. Maybe it wasn’t like how it was in the films, but god, Jongdae loved it—loved Baekhyun—because it was theirs.  
  
  
  
  
  
  


 

☼ _[epilogue]_ ☼

  
  
  
  
  
It was inevitable that within the first week of Jongdae and Baekhyun dating that one of them would give into their libido.  
  
Baekhyun called it ‘catching up,’ whilst Chanyeol good-naturedly called it, ‘Ew, Stop Being Gross and Making Out on My Couch’ with a wry smile. Baekhyun had been over a lot lately, but for all the good reasons this time, like making out on the bed and making out at the kitchen table at breakfast and making out in the bathroom and making out when Chanyeol was in and making out near Chanyeol and making out next to Chanyeol and sometimes making out on Chanyeol. They had a lot of lost time to make up for and Jongdae had a lot of gloating to do. He’d missed out, being single and all, and it was even better now that he could do it with Baekhyun.  
  
The first time that they had sex, it was decidedly vanilla. They were over at Baekhyun’s apartment, the one he shared with Yixing, because Jongdae very much preferred making out with Baekhyun to Chanyeol telling him how cute Jongin looked wearing his sweaters and how cute Jongin looked dancing and how cute Jongin looked breathing. Things were getting hot and heavy and they were rutting against each other on the couch until Baekhyun had pulled away from the kiss and looked at him with that look in his eyes, pupils blown so wide with arousal, and almost wordlessly, save for the moans of each other’s names and Yixing’s yell of _WHAT THE FUCK_ when he accidentally walked in, he tugged off Jongdae’s clothes and dug around the back of the sofa to find a bottle of lube he’d hidden there, covering his fingers with it.  
  
Baekhyun’s fingers were so pretty and thin and they felt so good inside him, the pleasure multiplied by the soft kisses Baekhyun was leaving on the inside of his thigh, and then Baekhyun fucked him, pressing their bodies flush together so he could kiss Jongdae, muffling his happy giggles with his lips.  
  
After that, Baekhyun had commented that he would be open to anything and they’d started to fuck everywhere they could—bed, table, couch, and handjobs in public bathrooms because Baekhyun liked the thrill that someone could walk in on them (on the other hand, it gave Jongdae a mini heart attack every time he heard the door squeak open, but Baekhyun did a pretty good job of distracting him from that).  
  
This time, they’d fucked on Baekhyun’s bed because it was there and convenient, and Baekhyun was curled against him, sated and happy as he squished himself right next to Jongdae, smiling sleepily at nothing in particular. Jongdae kissed the top of his nose, ready to go to sleep, when Baekhyun tiredly mumbled, “Mm, Jongdae?”  
  
He had his face buried in the crook of Jongdae’s neck, his arms around Jongdae’s torso. Jongdae could feel his breath ghosting over his throat. It tickled, but that wasn’t the reason why he was smiling.  
  
“Yeah?” said Jongdae.  
  
“Umm, the other day,” Baekhyun said, “I heard Chanyeol congratulating you on finding your Nemo. What’s a ‘nemo’?”  
  
Jongdae sifted his fingers through Baekhyun’s soft, black hair, which he had soon found out was perfect for him to twist his hands in when Baekhyun sucked his cock, until they reached the nape of his neck, and then he cupped Baekhyun’s face, feeling the shivers that trembled under his skin even though it wasn’t cold. He tilted Baekhyun’s face up so he could dip down and press a kiss to Baekhyun’s mouth; Baekhyun tasted like mint toothpaste, having crawled into bed after brushing his teeth and showering in vain because Jongdae had just kissed him silly afterwards, and he felt like sunshine in the middle of the night and…love.  
  
“You’re my Nemo,” said Jongdae, “because there are plenty of fish in the sea, but you’re the only one I’m looking for.”


End file.
